A Duke of Her Own

Page 69

That was the problem, to Eleanor’s mind. He would marry a woman without love, to nurture the children he had created without love.
It seemed wrong to her, deeply wrong, as surely as the way her own erotic impulses had never seemed wrong. It was almost a relief to feel something so strongly. At least she had some sort of moral compass, though it wasn’t one of which the church or her mother might approve. Leopold did not love Lisette, so he should not marry her.
With a scratch on the door, Willa entered, full of household news. “Lady Lisette is tired of the very idea of the treasure hunt,” she reported. “And she’s not interested in the orphans anymore either, though her maid, Jane, says she will regain interest when it’s time for the Ladies’ Committee to meet. But right now she doesn’t want to hear a word of them or Mrs. Minchem.”
There was nothing surprising in that. “Has she a new passion, then?” Eleanor inquired.
“Why, it’s those two little girls of the duke’s,” Willa said. “She was in the nursery with them for hours yesterday, playing as if she were a little one herself, so Jane says. She took breakfast with them today, and has started teaching the quieter one the lute. Phyllinda, I think her name is.”
“How nice,” Eleanor said.
“She’s dressed them up as beautiful as if they were little daughters of the manor,” Willa continued. “She had three seamstresses working at their costumes all night long.”
“I’ll wear that blue gown that Madame Gasquet had time to alter,” Eleanor said, not wanting to think about Lisette’s appropriation of the twins. “The one ordered by another customer.”
Willa brought out the gown. “Lady Lisette insisted that each girl must have her own maid, which upset the housekeeper because she has only two downstairs maids now. Their hair is piled that high; the maids were given special wool pads to give height.”
“Wool?” Eleanor exclaimed. “But that’s so hot and the sun is already shining!”
“It’s a bit strange because Lady Lisette herself doesn’t ever wear such things, but she ordered the maids to dress the girls’ hair with them. I hear the children aren’t that pleased.”
“Wait until the sun heats up that wool,” Eleanor said.
“Master Tobias wants to know if he may take Oyster with him on the treasure hunt,” Willa said.
“I suppose he may,” Eleanor replied. “As long as he keeps Oyster out of Lisette’s sight.”
“Oh, he will. There’s no love lost there, apparently. The little girls just dote on her, or so the nursery maid told me, but Master Tobias was quite snappish with her when she wanted the girls to sleep in her room for the night.”
“Why on earth would she wish to do that?”
“She planned to tell them stories of fairies and goblins,” Willa said. “Would you like this blue ribbon, my lady, or this dark green one?”
“The blue, please,” Eleanor said. “Fairies and goblins?”
“Jane says that Lady Lisette often stays up all night long singing and playing her lute and such, and then she sleeps during the day.”
“That must be difficult for the household.”
“Everyone receives a generous gift on Boxing Day from the duke. Apparently he makes a joke of the fact that his household is better-paid that any other in the county: he says it’s the ‘Lisette Toll,’ as if she were a toll road, you see.”
“Has her father arrived yet?”
“Not yet. Lady Marguerite is here, though. She arrived just before breakfast. The squire’s family will be coming for the day, and all the ladies on the orphanage committee. It’s a proper fête! The house will be bursting at the seams.”
“I believe my mother wishes us to leave after the treasure hunt,” Eleanor said.
“Not now that the Duke of Astley has returned,” Willa said with a knowing look in her eye. “He arrived two hours ago, practically at the crack of dawn, and Her Grace told her maid that we’d stay as long as he does. Mrs. Busy is cooking so you wouldn’t believe, as it’ll be a grand dinner tonight with Lisette’s father here. He’s almost never home, you know. They say he can’t bear to see Lisette as she is. He never broke off that betrothal with the squire’s son because he keeps hoping she’ll change.”
Eleanor digested that in silence. It was only when Willa had declared her to be quite ready that she asked, “What did Tobias say to Lisette, do you know?”
“He told her to stubble it because she’d give the girls nightmares,” Willa said, laughing. “And the whole household is saying how Lisette has met her match at last, because she didn’t have a word to say back to him. She knew that a spasm would just make him laugh at her, so she didn’t bother, just left the room, and that was the end of her plan.”
“I would guess that he will have no problem controlling Oyster during the treasure hunt,” Eleanor said. “If he can manage Lisette, he can manage a naughty puppy.”
She cast a look out the balcony door before going downstairs. The lawn was already dotted with the white gowns of the committee ladies, their lacy parasols making them look like daisies. The orphans in their blue pinafores were darting and running about, and Eleanor didn’t think it was her imagination that they already looked heartier.
She didn’t want to go downstairs. She wanted to avoid Gideon, and avoid her mother as well. She wanted to avoid Lisette, because she might be tempted into unkindness, if not violence. She wanted to avoid Roland, because she wasn’t in a poetic mood, and she didn’t particularly wish to meet his father’s hopeful eyes, either.
But she couldn’t hide. So she wandered downstairs just in time to see Lisette formally begin the hunt by ringing a little silver bell. A stage had been built in the back garden, and she was prancing about like the Queen of May, handing out flowers to all the children. Apparently the winning child wasn’t to wear a gold crown, unless Lisette was planning to take it off her own head. She was wearing a small but unmistakably genuine crown; Eleanor couldn’t believe that there were two such crowns in all of Kent.
“Titania, Queen of the Fairies,” Roland said, appearing at her shoulder.
“I always pictured Titania clad in gauzy leaves with her hair loose,” Eleanor said, giving him a smile.
“Titania was a termagant,” Roland said, “and that’s the crucial distinction. Remember how Shakespeare says that she fought with her husband so violently that all the corn rotted in the field?”
“You are unkind,” Eleanor said, frowning at him.
“I will admit that I hadn’t conceived of Titania’s fairies as bastard children of a duke.”
Phyllinda and Lucinda were standing on either side of Lisette, looking like small attendants, if not fairy ones. Their hair was piled so high that they appeared to be wearing airy beehives. They were both dressed in cloth of gold, which seemed utterly inappropriate for such a hot day, but their dresses did match Lisette’s crown.
Still, what did she know about children? Perhaps they loved Lisette’s reflected glory. Certainly the ladies from the orphanage committee were agog over the girls’ beauty. And Lisette was rather carefully not identifying their lineage. Eleanor had a strong feeling that the good Christian members of the Ladies’ Committee might not be quite so rapturous over Phyllinda’s lovely eyes if they knew her parentage.