A Duke of Her Own

Page 70

“No child is going to win the prize,” Roland said disgustedly, looking up from the page of clues. “I wouldn’t be able to solve them. Listen to this: In marble walls as white as milk, lined with a skin as soft as silk, within a fountain crystal clear, a golden apple doth appear.”
“What?”
“Wait, I’m not done. No doors there are to this stronghold, yet thieves break in and steal the gold. What am I?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“I know that one, but only because my nanny used to tell it to me. The answer is, an egg. Lisette apparently expects the children to figure the riddle and then be able to find the henhouse and bring back an egg.”
Eleanor shrugged. “I suppose she’ll just give the prizes to whichever children solve one or two riddles, then.”
“That will be Villiers’s bastards,” Roland said with a sneer.
“Why do you say so?”
“Because Lisette isn’t playing fair, of course.” He nodded.
Sure enough, Lisette was whispering in Lucinda’s ear. The little girl dimpled up at her and patted her hand, and then ran off.
Eleanor discovered that she was smiling. The expression on Lucinda’s face didn’t display adoration, the way Willa had described. She would describe it as something altogether more knowing—and more manipulative. Well, what would she have expected? They were Villiers’s daughters, after all.
She looked around again, trying to ignore the way Roland was standing too close to her. Gideon was basking in her mother’s smiles. Lucinda had run directly from Lisette over to Tobias, who was lounging by the raspberry bushes. There was no sign of Oyster, to her relief. A great flock of orphans in blue pinafores were clustered together, puzzling over the clues; they seemed to be having as much trouble reading them as solving them.
Villiers was nowhere to be seen. It was ridiculous to find that the day lost its flavor simply because an errant duke had chosen not to participate in the frolic.
Just then a soft voice said, “Lady Eleanor.” She looked down to find Phyllinda smiling up at her.
With precisely the same smile her twin had just used on Lisette.
“I don’t know the answers,” Eleanor said bluntly. “I can’t help you.”
Phyllinda’s smile just broadened and she held up her hand. “Will you help me with something in the house, Lady Eleanor? Please?” The last please was tacked on with pitiful emphasis.
Eleanor could hardly say no, even given the fact that the child was clearly up to something. “What?” she asked.
Phyllinda leaned close and whispered, “It’s private. To do with my petticoats.”
Since, in her better moments, she was a lady, Eleanor didn’t roll her eyes. Instead she took the hand Phyllinda was offering and followed her into the house. They passed Gideon, who cast a look at their linked hands and grew a little stiff.
“It’s up here,” Phyllinda said, lisping a bit.
Having a naturally suspicious mind, Eleanor thought back to the way Phyllinda spoke when she and her sister were first uncovered in the carriage. No lisp. One had to suppose that the lisp had been proven effective in outwitting adults susceptible to mindless sentiment.
“This is your bedchamber, isn’t it?” Phyllinda lisped, stepping to the side. She was overacting terribly.
“Yes,” Eleanor said, pushing open the door to her room and walking in. “What do you—”
It was with no great feeling of surprise that she heard the door shut behind her and a key turn in the lock. It seemed she had been given a reprieve from the spectacle, just as she wished. She pulled off her blue slippers and wiggled her toes, then strolled over and reached for the bell to ring for Willa, only to find that it had been cut off. Intrepid of them. One might even call it diabolical.
The only thing that made her remotely curious was why. She didn’t present any particular threat to the children’s desire to win the prizes donated by her mother, Lisette, and the Duke of Villiers. Of course she could go onto her balcony and call down to the crowd below. But it seemed ungracious, somehow.
So, taking advantage of the unscheduled opportunity, she lay down on her bed and listened to the hubbub of polite voices drifting from the garden. She didn’t wake up until the door opened.
“I wondered where you were,” she asked in a drowsy voice. “Did they just lock the door behind you, too?”
“Yes.” Villiers sounded a bit testy.
“Perhaps the adults are being removed to allow more time for answering riddles,” Eleanor offered, turning on her side and tucking a hand under her cheek. “In that case, we should expect Lisette to join us any moment.”
He snorted and threw himself into an armchair. She was trying to remember her dream, because he had been in it. Oyster had thrown himself at her in his usual frenzied display of love, and—
“You were wearing a pinafore,” she exclaimed. To a raised eyebrow, she explained, “In my dream. And,” she added thoughtfully, “nothing else.”
“I would like to have that dream about you, but I don’t care for the thought of myself in a frock. You look tiresomely beautiful,” Villiers observed. He stretched out his legs. “It’s not that I mind being locked up with you, but what the devil are we doing in here?”
“I have no idea.”
“I told Tobias that I would not allow him to win the prize.”
“Well, that explains why you’re here, then. I fail to see why I should suffer the same fate. Nor why we have to be together.”
“You think that my son locked me in a room so that he could win fifty pounds, after I expressly forbade him to do so?” Villiers’s voice was cold, so cold, but she knew him now. She knew to look past the utterly dazzling costume he was wearing, and past his chilly look, straight into his eyes. He was angry…he was a little hurt.
“He’s just like you,” she pointed out. “What he wants, he intends to get.”
“I’m not like that. Well, I might be like that, but I don’t lock people in rooms.”
“Then you’ve learned something useful about your son. And I must say, if you didn’t already know that he believes in shortcuts to winning, you haven’t played knucklebones with him.”
“You’re the one who cheated,” he pointed out.
“Only after prying the bones out from under his leg and then again from his sleeve. He’s got those little girls of yours begging the answers from Lisette. Cheating, in other words.”
He was silent a moment. And then, very un-ducally: “Devil take it!”
“That’s parenthood,” she said cheerfully. “If you don’t lay down the rules the right way, the child simply slips the leash and does as she wishes. Just look at me. My poor mother has no idea what a hussy I am. She would be not only astonished, but affronted.”
“I don’t see why it’s her fault that you succumbed to Gideon’s blue eyes. Though may I add that I am astonished by the vapid shallowness with which he is basking in your mother’s attentions?”
“Gideon does adore my mother. When his mother died, she became something of a substitute.”
Villiers snorted. “Now what are we supposed to do?”