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

Ned peered at his drink. “That doesn’t feel right to me. Swells and nobs dally where they please—they are expected to dally, and as long as they look after their bastards, nobody gives it a thought. What’s one more affair with an unsuspecting Quaker girl? Champlain diddled everybody from merry widows to French violinists, from what I’ve heard.”

“If he was passing state secrets to the French violinist,” Quinn said slowly, “that might imperil the succession.”

Stephen left off rubbing his knee. “Say that again.”

“If Champlain committed treason,” Quinn said, “he could be convicted posthumously, and his son’s ability to inherit anything through him jeopardized.”

Quinn was on to something, but Stephen’s brain was too tired—and his heart too busy missing Abigail—to pick out the threads of a theory. Treason could result in an attainted title, but did Stapleton have enough smart, determined enemies in the Lords to effect such a convoluted scheme?

“I don’t think it works quite like that,” Stephen said. “If Champlain committed treason, he wasn’t the titleholder at the time. I’ll pay a call on your friends at the College of Arms and ask them a few questions.”

“I am off to ask questions of my pillow,” Ned said, rising. “A fine evening’s frolic, my lord.” He bowed to Stephen. “The lads and I thank you for it. Oh, and you might be interested to know that Fleming is calling on Stapleton’s mistress once a week.”

“Busy lady,” Quinn muttered, finishing his drink. “One cannot envy her her duties.”

“When does she see Fleming?” Stephen asked.

“Tuesday afternoons. She keeps a calendar. Stapleton calls Monday and Thursday at two p.m. and departs at three thirty. He’s never underfoot at any other time. The fair Miss Marchant also entertains a Mr. Watling, probably the paper merchant.”

“Was she once upon a time an opera dancer?” Stephen asked.

Ned gathered up his boots. “Not her too, Wentworth. Does a bad knee compel you to overuse other parts of your anatomy?”

Perhaps it had. Stephen would ask Abigail what she thought of that theory, and she would probably plant him a facer for his impertinence. If she was very wroth, she might be persuaded to spank him.

“Miss Marchant and I are not acquainted,” Stephen said, “but I probably know some people who are friendly with her. Go to bed, and my thanks for a job discreetly done.”

“’Night, Ned,” Quinn called, settling lower on the sofa as Ned took his leave. “I miss Jane.”

“Poor lamb. You had to go out among the wolves without your shepherdess.” Stephen shifted the pillow under his foot. “I have never longed to dance with a woman as desperately as I longed to dance with Abigail tonight. She was the loveliest female in the ballroom, and there I was, stuck at the bloody piquet table.”

“Jane says Miss Abbott doesn’t dance.”

“Abigail doesn’t know how to dance. If I had two sound legs, I could coax her into it.” A lovely dream, that, and Stephen had studied the instruction books enough to know that the patterns of the waltz weren’t so very complicated. “She made me copies of the letters.”

“She being Abigail. You’ve read them?”

“I’ve read half of them, and like Abigail, I sense a pattern that refuses to emerge. Your notion about treason is intriguing, because that would affect the heir, and Stapleton is the sort whose heir matters to him.”

Quinn regarded him by the light of the fire. “My heir matters to me too. How exactly did Jack Wentworth die, Stephen?”

Chapter Eleven

Between one tick of the mantel clock and the next, a series of thoughts marched through Stephen’s tired brain.

Why was Quinn raising this distasteful topic now?

Why hadn’t anybody raised it sooner? Jack had been dead close to twenty years.

Was Stephen protecting himself by withholding the truth, or was he protecting Quinn? Perhaps protecting Quinn’s view of himself as a competent older sibling?

And the final thought: Abigail was not ashamed of Stephen for having interceded on behalf of his sisters. And if Abigail did not condemn him…

“I killed him,” Stephen said. “Put a tot of rat poison in his gin. It took a while, but he eventually succumbed and everybody attributed his passing to bad drink.”

“You killed him.” A question lurked in that statement. Perhaps a Why? or an Are you sure?

“Jack was planning to sell Althea and Constance to a brothel, and the buyer was coming around with money at the end of the week. I knew with Jack dead you’d be summoned off whatever clerk’s stool or fishing boat you were working on, because nobody wanted three more useless children depending on the parish. The neighbors kept us until you showed up.”

Some emotion ought to suffuse this recitation, but all Stephen could muster was relief to be dealing in the truth.

“You put rat poison in his gin. I am…” Quinn stared at the foot Stephen had propped on the hassock. “I am…I am sorry.”

Whatever Stephen might have expected his brother to say—I am disappointed, surprised, not surprised—I am sorry hadn’t been on the list.

“I made the decision, Quinn. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I am sorry you did not feel you could tell me this. Sorry I never thought to ask. Sorry that at the age of eight, you were put in the position where such a desperate measure was the logical course. You did the right thing.”

The night was apparently to be full of surprises. “I took my father’s life. How can that have been the right thing to do?” Stephen had never quite asked that question, but it had haunted the remains of his childhood and the entirety of his adolescence. Perhaps it haunted him still.

“Jack bragged about breaking your leg,” Quinn said, “about making a proper beggar boy of you and teaching you proper respect for your sire. Do you recall the game he’d play, tossing a crust of bread on the floor and making the three of you fight each other for it?”

“You never played.”

“And then you refused to play, though you were barely