Page 11 of My Own True Duchess
Quite cheering, to see marital bliss among the elders.
“You’re saying what everybody else is saying,” Della replied, putting down the pigeon and making another circuit of Nick’s woodworking shop. “Jonathan is Mr. Eligible. I hate that term, as if he’s the last true bachelor in Mayfair.”
Why didn’t I take my countess driving when I had the chance? Why didn’t I install a lock on the door to my woodworking shop?
“Della, you must not meddle. The worst affliction a bachelor can suffer is a meddling relation.” Nick had warned his wife the previous evening along the same lines. Leah had kissed him, patted his cravat, and gone back to surveying her ballroom with the gimlet eye of a matchmaking general.
Della whirled, and by the very swish of her skirts, by the thump of her slippers against the plank floor, Nick knew he’d said something wrong.
“Relation,” Della said, her voice low and bitter. “That’s as close as you can come to admitting the truth. Jonathan Tresham is my brother, Nicholas. I have blood in common with him.”
This anger in Della was new and bewildering. She’d always been a cheerful girl, a baby sister a brother could dote on… even if Nick’s step-mama had conceived Della in an irregular liaison with Tresham’s father.
“He’s your half-brother, but what matters blood, Della, when we love you, we have always loved you, and the late earl loved you most of all?” Nick’s papa had accepted his wife’s by-blow in the spirit of a man who’d been no saint himself and who had, in his imperfect fashion, loved his countess and every child under their roof.
“Papa is gone,” Della said, hefting an awl and holding it like a dagger, “and Jonathan is the only link I have to my real father. You’d toss Jonathan into the arms of any scheming henwit with the audacity to waylay him.”
Somebody had waylaid Tresham. One of Nick’s sleeve buttons had come loose at last night’s ball, and he’d ducked up to his dressing closet for another pair. The shortest route had taken him past his study, from which Tresham’s voice in conversation with a woman had drifted. A footman had come by with a tray bearing generous portions of food, and Nick had silently wished the lady good hunting.
Though a quiet tryst in a secluded study was an unlikely beginning to a courtship.
“Tresham has wit enough for ten bachelors, Della. You’re the one trying to marry him off.”
“I met him less than a year ago, Nicholas. If he must marry, I want him to marry the right woman.”
Nick set aside his knife, for tail feathers wanted concentration, which was impossible with Della fretting and pacing.
“You are worried that Tresham will ignore his connection to you once he takes a duchess. That he’ll marry a high-stickling prig whose self-importance ignores the realities of human nature and the existence of Tresham’s only sibling.”
Della came to a halt before the birdcage Nick had crafted for his nightingale. The wire was painted gold. A wooden facsimile of a lilac bush would provide the fake bird a fake perch. Leah could hang it in her parlor without a living creature having suffered for the sake of human pleasure.
Della opened and closed the cage door, which squeaked a bit. “Jonathan will be a duke. He can’t marry just anybody.”
Nick risked draping an arm across her shoulders. “His uncle held out against the matchmakers for decades, and Tresham is no fool. If he cuts you, if he ignores you, if he in any way hurts your feelings, Leah will do him an injury that jeopardizes the succession of his title.”
And then Nick would kill him.
Della leaned against Nick’s side and set the awl on the workbench. “I want to be his friend, Nicholas, but all I am to him is an inconveniently persistent nuisance.”
Nick took Della by the hand and led her to the workshop’s window seat, a perch where Leah read by the hour. This docility from Della would be gone in five minutes, so he’d make what use of it he could.
“Tresham isn’t one of us, Della. He has no idea how to go on with a family. He was shipped off to public school at age seven, went straight to Cambridge, then undertook travel before he turned twenty. He was a brawler in the schoolyard, but became senior wrangler in mathematics at university. He’s unfamiliar with polite society, unfamiliar with family, and not just any duchess will suit him.”
“He was top wrangler? He earned the highest score in his whole class in the maths examination?”
“He earned spectacular marks in all of his academic endeavors, which is unusual in a ducal heir.”
“And then he disappeared,” Della said, leaving the window seat. “I didn’t know he was a scholar. How could I not know that about my brother?”
“He’s nigh ten years your senior. Do you know what Adolphus got up to while at Cambridge?”
Della sent Nick a peevish look. “Nobody knows what Dolph does in his laboratory. He scribbles a lot and occasionally causes explosions.”
“So if you don’t know what one brother is about, why would you castigate yourself for being unfamiliar with another brother?”
“Dolph is Dolph. I don’t look like him.”
Della did, unfortunately, bear a resemblance to Tresham. They were both dark-haired, had the same mouth, the same slightly aquiline nose, though Tresham was tall and Della petite. If they were seen together with any frequency, somebody would doubtless remark the similarity.
