Page 1 of Lessons for Marquesses
PROLOGUE
15 July 1754
Farendon Estate
Huntingdonshire, England
Where his anklewas shackled to the frame, Nicholas Clayton pressed from the bed as a coach approached his home.
The guard across his room straightened to right his pistol at Nicholas's chest. “Get yerself back there.”
In the event he overcame this guard, there was another outside his chamber door.
Dropping to the chair next to the bed, Nicholas scoured a palm over his shorn hair. In his twenty years, he had never raised a hand to anyone or anything. His father, the Marquess of Eastwick, said he was the straight arrow. The good boy, his mother called him. He thought on everything he said before he said it. And his older brother, Edmund, the heir to the marquessate, had never thought.
Edmund was dead.
Coach wheels slowed in the distance. Springs groaned to a halt. Gravel crunched and masculine voices conferred. The west portico door thumped shut.
Not one, but two coaches had arrived. One to take him to London to stand trial, Nicholas assumed. He saw the backing of a prosecution with William St. Clair’s relentless wealth. The trial. The hanging.Hishanging.
Oliver St. Clair, his close friend since Eton, nephew of William St. Clair, marched into the room and jabbed at the guard. “You. Out.”
“I got me orders?—”
“Get. Out. Or I’ll shove that pistol down your throat.”
The guard measured Oliver, a stout and fiery young politician in wrinkled grey suiting and a crooked brown wig, and vacated his post.
Oliver dragged Nicholas to his feet and hugged him hard. “Christ, Nick.”
“I’m not dead,” Nicholas said, his grin arising from somewhere dark. "Yet.”
Oliver stared up, his mouth agape.
“Has Edmund been laid to rest?” Nicholas asked.
“Yes, laid to rest. And no one was surprised. Sad but not surprised.”
Edmund was a libertine.
No, Edmundhad beena libertine, just like their father. His golden looks and charming veneer had gotten him to his twenty-fifth year before someone had put an end to his gaming and drink, his appropriation of other men’s wives, his love of jests at others’ expense.
What had Edmund done the day Nicholas had found his brother dead in St. Clair’s billiard room? The last Nicholas had seen, Edmund had been emptying William St. Clair’s pockets by the thousands. Had Edmund been foolhardy or drunk enoughto cheat the man who collected the rents of almost every family within twenty miles? With estates in five counties, two homes in London and businesses as far as the colonies?
Nicholas knew in his bones William St. Clair had killed his brother.
“Your family believes you, Nick,” Oliver said. “They know you would never harm a soul, let alone your brother.”
“They will make excellent witnesses at my trial.”
Oliver stepped wide, swiping away a tear with his sleeve. “There will be no trial.”
Nicholas lunged forward, halted by the shackle. “Are they releasing me?”
Oliver shook his head.
Of course not. Nicholas had been discovered in the billiard room, clutching his dead brother to his chest. William St. Clair and a crowd of servants had gaped. All of them had looked Nicholas over, the blood on his hands, on his forehead, on his coat.
