Page 11 of Libby's London Merchant
“You are all kindness,’’ he said.
Libby stole a sidelong look at Anthony Cook. The words from anyone else would have seemed merely a glib utterance, soon forgotten. When Dr. Cook said them, they seemed to mean something. I wonder why he is not married yet, she thought.
3
“Why am I doing this?” the Duke of Knaresborough asked himself again as he clucked to the modest horse that pulled his gig sedately across Kent.
Augusta had been too quick for him in the dining room. When Luster had announced to his sister that the duke was already on his way to the Lake District, she uttered an oath that made Benedict blush in the dark of the dumbwaiter, and marched right to his hiding place, flinging the door open. She stared at him with narrowed eyes, hands on her hips, lips pressed tight together, until he started to sweat.
“Benedict Nesbitt, it is high time you grew up and did your duty by your family,” she said to him finally, biting off each word.
Meekly he pulled himself from the dumbwaiter. Augusta jabbed her thumb in the direction of a chair and he sat down, wishing that his head wasn’t five times larger than the room and Augusta’s voice less debilitating in his weakened state.
He listened with half an ear as she railed on about “choicest morsels on the marriage mart,” and “devoting my good time to you,” but took exception when she started in on his ancestors and how they must be reeling about in the family vault.
“Now really, Gussie,” he had attempted, but she cut him off with a fierce stare.
“Yes, really! Every one of them married and set up their nurseries.” She flung her arms about. “And here you are, rising thirty, and all you can think about is drinking your next bottle. You didn’t used to be this way.”
He sat there and took it all, knowing that she would never understand how comforting were the moments when the liquor was inside him and his surroundings were a pleasant blur. He wasn’t cold then, that peculiar battlefield cold that he couldn’t forget. He couldn’t hear anything when he was full of Scotch or gin—it didn’t matter. There were no sudden sounds, no stirrings and rustling, none of his dying men, ghosts a year now after Waterloo, pleading for help that he couldn’t render. Augusta would never understand the way wine allowed the responsibility to slip from his shoulders and that he could forget, if only for a moment, the weight of his years and the years stretching ahead.
Augusta would never understand, so he made no attempt to tell her. He wanted her to go away. If she would only leave, he could straighten himself around and then begin drinking again, and he would soon forget that she had ever been there.
But Augusta was not budging this time. He struggled to listen to her. She droned on and on about Kensington Galleries and Lady Fanny Hyslip until he put the two together and nodded.
The effect on Augusta was startling. Without a warning, she grabbed him and kissed his cheek. “I knew you would not fail me, brother,” she said. “Two o’clock, then? Fanny and I will be at the exhibit of Titians.”
He nodded and suffered his hand to be wrung. “You’ll never regret this, Nez,” his sister was saying, and already he could not remember what it was he would never regret.
He managed to wave in her general direction as she left the room as swiftly as she had entered it. He spent a moment in muddled reflection, then sank into sleep again.
He woke hours later, wrenched from sleep by his butler, whose face showed every sign of strain. It was the face of a man who, in a matter of seconds, could be capable of giving his notice.
The duke struggled into an upright position, marveling at how his head throbbed. His throat was drier than a Spanish plain, and he wanted a drink. He motioned toward the sideboard, but Luster ignored him, going so far as to clutch the front of his dressing gown and haul him back into the chair.
“Your grace, do you know what time it is?”
Nez shook his head and shuddered as his brains rolled from side to side. His eyes started to close again. Driven to desperation, Luster grabbed him by his shoulders, something he had never done before.
“Your grace, you were promised to your sister and Lady Fanny Hyslip at two o’clock in the Kensington Galleries.”
“Was I?” he asked, struggling to remember his sister’s visit, which couldn’t have happened above thirty minutes ago. “Ah, yes. I remember now. Well, what of it?”
Luster sank down in the chair next to his master and declared in a toneless voice, “Your grace, it is after three o’clock.” He looked suddenly old. “I left instructions with the footman to make sure you were awake. He has failed me.”
“Dear me,” said the duke. To his credit, he felt a tiny ripple of fear running like fingers along his backbone. “I’ll send flowers,” he said.
“I rather think it has gone beyond flowers, your grace, particularly since this is not the first time this week you have failed Lady Wogan,” Luster replied. Forgetting the dignity of his years and office, he leapt to his feet and scurried to the window. He peered around the edge of the draperies as if afraid of what he might see on the street.
‘I have only just received a missive from your sister to inform you that she is coming directly.” He paused and wiped a mustache of sweat from his upper lip. “And she is bringing your mother.” He drew the word out and allowed it to soak into the duke’s piffled brain. “Your mother,” he repeated. He wiped his hands like Pontius Pilate, and left the window.
“God’s wounds,” breathed the duke, “I am in the basket now, ain’t I?”
“You are, sir,” agreed the butler. Luster’s right eye began to twitch ever so slightly.
The duke pulled himself to his feet. He looked at Luster and then crossed to the window himself and peered out. He stood there in silence for a long moment.
“We could be facing a crisis of monumental proportions, Luster,” he murmured as he let the drapery fell from nerveless fingers.
