Page 1 of Libby's London Merchant
1
“I say, Nez, you’re not paying a ha’penny’s worth of attention.”
Benedict Nesbitt, Duke of Knaresborough, grunted, shifted his weight, and rolled gently onto the floor.
“Eustace, you have my undivided attention,” the duke replied as he rested his head on the pillow that had rolled off with him.
“Oh, bother it!” Eustace’s voice rose to an unpleasant pitch. He picked up another pillow to throw at his friend and succeeded only in knocking down the few remaining bottles still standing upright on the table. “Here I am, facing the crisis of my life, and all you can do is drink my wine and grunt.”
“It’s my wine,” insisted the voice from the floor, “and it’s my house.”
Eustace tried to sit up straight. He looked about in surprise as his eyes narrowed. “Well, Lord bless me, you may be right.” He nodded wisely and settled lower in his chair again. “I suppose you will tell me that is why the butler did not look familiar.”
“That is what I would tell you,” said the patient man on the floor, who groped for the second pillow and put it over his face.
Eustace Wiltmore, Earl of Devere, sighed the sigh of a man bereft of all resource and fumbled among the bottles. He picked up the liquor-soaked letter and held it upside down, close to his face. “My father has sentenced me to wedlock, Nez, my dear. You could at least offer condolences.”
The man on the floor took the pillow off his face and sat up. He stared owl-eyed at his friend. “There are two of you, Eustace,” he concluded after a moment of reflection. “Don’t you think that a trifle extravagant?”
Eustace scowled and fanned himself with the letter. “Would that there were, my boy. Then one of me could flee and none would be the wiser.” He crumpled the letter and tossed it toward the fireplace, which had winked out hours before.
A bird began to warble outside the window. The Duke of Knaresborough winced and put his hand to his temple. He pressed hard until there was only one Eustace Wiltmore. “Eustace, are you under the hatches again?” he asked.
“As always, Nez, as always,” replied the other man, his face mournful. “Have you ever known me when I was not?”
Nez closed his eyes. “Tell me something. You’re not already promised to another, are you?”
Eustace shuddered elaborately. “Good Lord, man, you know I have made it my life’s ambition to avoid parson’s mousetrap.”
“Ah, but Eustace, that is your solution,” said the duke, picking his words carefully. “Marry this wealthy woman so long promised in your family, and you’ll never have pockets to let again. You don’t have to like it; you merely have to do it.”
The only sound for several moments was Eustace filling another glass and gulping down its contents. “And now I suppose you will tell me this is rather like Hougoumont or Quatre Bras,” he accused.
“I suppose I will, Eustace,” the duke agreed. “We none of us had much fun that day, but we did the thing. You need merely to plan your campaign as carefully as Wellington and bring this event to pass.”
Eustace was silent again, and it was the same stubborn silence that the Duke of Knaresborough remembered from their shared childhood. He opened his eyes and spent several minutes in close observation of his friend.
Eustace Wiltmore, he of the mournful eye, observed back. “Oh, think of something,” he pleaded.
But the duke was busy, taking in Eustace’s pallor, studded here and there with wispy beard. He noted the way Wiltmore’s long nose meandered down in the general direction of his too-short upper lip. Eustace’s whole face seemed to droop in folds toward his neck with all the grace of a basset hound.
“I think we are getting old, Eustace,” the duke concluded.
Eustace groaned. “That is the best you can do?”
The duke stared back stupidly. ‘‘Well, yes, I rather think it is,” he replied. “I’m as mizzled as you are, dear boy, and who ever had a good idea at a moment like this?”
“It’s a thought,” agreed Eustace with reluctance, and turned his attention to the window, which was gradually turning from black to gray. He staggered to his feet and, opening the window, perched himself on the sill. “You are forcing me to think, aren’t you, Nez? I call that a rascally thing.”
Nez sat up. “I had no idea you were so serious,” he said. “This may be the first time since Cambridge that you have been forced to think.”
The wounded look that Eustace bestowed on him would have made Nez laugh out loud, except that his head was beginning to throb.
“I told you these were desperate times,” Eustace said.
The duke pulled himself upright to the table and searched among the bottles and remains of last night’s dinner, which had congealed on the plates. He pawed this way and that among the ruin of beef scraps and fish bones until Eustace was drawn from the window to stand over him.
“Whatever are you doing, Nez, rummaging about like a hog in a midden?” the earl asked crossly.
