How to Catch a Duke by Grace Burrowes (buy e reader TXT) 📕

my father’s death, my mother’s death. I stopped crying every time I read them. I stopped reading them all from start to finish, and instead browsed one or two.…”

Abigail stood by the bow window that overlooked the garden, tall, straight, dry-eyed, while Stephen absorbed what she wasn’t saying.

She had known repeated, grievous loss. She had not simply given her heart to Champlain, she had fallen for him body and soul. If Stephen lived to be a hundred and wrote letters to every woman he’d ever admired, none of those ladies would treasure his words as Abigail had treasured Champlain’s maunderings.

A fine wine, a talented violinist…mere travelogues with some smarmy endearment appended for form’s sake, and Abigail had counted those letters among her most precious possessions. What would it be like to so thoroughly claim a woman’s allegiance that even casual notes became holy relics?

“When did you last see the letters?” And won’t you please come sit beside me again?

“I had them in the spring,” Abigail said, turning her back on the window. “I know I had them in April, because the baby died in April and I read over the last letter to mark the occasion.”

“Did Champlain know you’d lost the child?”

“He did. He sent me a bank draft after our last…after we argued. A sizable sum. I was insulted and never deposited it. A week after I miscarried, I sent it back with a few lines of explanation. He did not reply, which I considered decent of him. By then I wanted nothing to do with him, and within two years, he was dead. I learned later than he’d left a child behind, a very young, legitimate son.”

“Champlain sent you a bank draft.” Abigail had said that almost casually.

“Yes, a substantial amount.”

Stephen had always struggled with his temper, particularly in adolescence, when other boys were gaining height and muscle, and he was becoming yet more awkward and visibly unsound. He had enough experience containing his rages that he could speak somewhat calmly.

“Champlain bestirred himself to spend three minutes affixing his name to a piece of paper. A bank draft. Does a bank draft check under a boy’s bed at night to make sure Old Scratch isn’t lurking there to steal an unsuspecting little fellow away in his sleep?”

Abigail’s expression had become wary. “I beg your pardon?”

“Does a bank draft explain to a lad that some words, no matter how much swagger they convey, are never used before the ladies?”

“My lord?”

“Does a bank draft read tales to a boy of brave knights on their destriers or magical unicorns whose horns can cure all ills? Does a bank draft give a child affection, love, a sense of his place in the world? A bank draft. Bloody hell.”

Abigail regarded him from a distance of several yards across a sea of consternation. “I would think that a man raised in want of coin would value financial responsibility in a parent.”

“You were insulted by that bank draft,” Stephen retorted, “because you know that coin alone does not raise a child. Quinn used to leave his wages with Althea. He’d sneak around to wherever we were begging or make stupid bird calls outside the window until she could slip away. We’d have food for a few days. Lucky us.”

“You consider yourself unlucky to have an older brother taking an interest in your welfare?”

A logical question, but what did a lame boy know of logic? “He left us with Jack Wentworth, Abigail. Time after time, he’d scuttle away, back to his grave digging or his footman’s job, knowing that Jack was using his fists and worse on us. I begged Quinn to take me with him, but he said to stay where I had a roof over my head, to stay and look out for my sisters.”

Begging for food had never been half so corrosive to Stephen’s soul as begging Quinn not to go, begging him to take them with him.

“And you held up your side of the bargain,” Abigail said. “You plainly took your sisters’ welfare to heart in a way your brother could not. Quinn provided the coin, you provided the safety, though I shudder to think of the toll that arrangement took on such a young and defenseless boy.”

Abigail was so refreshingly practical, and her view of the matter—Stephen doing the part Quinn could not—hadn’t occurred to him previously. He’d reconciled himself to having committed murder, but in a situation where nobody dared interfere with a habitually violent father, perhaps that constituted a child’s form of self-defense?

A merciful God might see it thus. Perhaps. Maybe.

“I would do it again,” Stephen said, “if I heard Jack making the same plans for Althea and Constance, I’d do it again in a trice. Quinn was off somewhere on a job that was expected to last weeks. I planned to drink the poison myself at first. If Jack would sell my sisters to a brothel, what fate would he plan for me? Then it occurred to me that the poison might have another use.”

And what a wicked, hopeful thought that had been. “I recall gazing at the gin bottle in its place of honor on the windowsill, the light shining through the blue glass, obscuring the color of the contents. Jack was not a delicate drinker. He guzzled in quantity. Althea and Constance were out, unaware of the danger, and there I was, alone with my conscience and a quantity of rat poison.” Not a perfect solution, because rat poison did not take immediate effect.

But a solution nonetheless.

“How fortunate for your sisters that you did not go off into service with your brother.”

Fortunate for them. Althea had likely figured out the sequence of events, but she’d never mentioned it, and neither had Stephen.

He’d recounted the whole to Abigail, along with all the sordid details. What had got into him? “Suffice it to say that bank drafts do not impress me when paternal duty is at issue, and this digression is hardly relevant to the instant topic. When