Page 11 of How to Ruin a Duke
Chapter Three
“A duke takes to vice like a duck to water.One might think a duke sunk in sin is a square peg in the round hole of Society—but trust this author!The Duke of Amorous’s peg is his greatest preoccupation.”
FromHow to Ruin a Dukeby Anonymous
The damaged violoncello still lay atop the worktable the following morning, but Rowena decided to begin the day with a smaller task: by trimming a new tuning peg for a Rugeri violin.A beautiful instrument with a spruce belly and a back of flame maple, it was owned by a young matron who hadn’t played a note since her wedding day.
“I’d like to begin again,” Mrs.Beckett had confided to Rowena when she entrusted the violin to her the day before.
I’d like to begin again, too, Rowena thought.She craved a fresh start, with no red in her ledger.
Fabricating a tuning peg was a fairly simple task, and simple was what Rowena wanted right now so her thoughts could roam.Not only over how the new peg would fit, but also what she’d agreed to the evening before.
Time with Simon Thorn.A partnership.The hope of saving the shop.
And a pair of mischievous brown eyes, a hand on hers, and a packet of hairpins he hadn’t needed to bring.
He would return this morning, before she opened the shop, and they would discuss further plans for drawing new business.Effective immediately, she had agreed the evening before, she would double her rates for all new jobs—except for tuning pianofortes, a task most luthiers didn’t accept.Those jobs were tedious enough that she’d charge triple.
It seemed presumptuous to charge more than her father had after all his decades of experience.But then, as Simon had pointed out, if her father had charged the same rate for all of Rowena’s years of memory, he had likely undervalued his work.Which led to Rowena undervaluing her own.
“And it’s not as if meat and bread cost what they did twenty-eight years ago, when I was born,” he had added.“Or rent, as you know.”
She couldn’t argue with that.
So, he was two years older than Rowena.She had squirreled away that fact about him, as she did every other tidbit of gleaned information: that he needed money for someone back home, wherever that was.That he’d speak frankly about many things, but not that.
Anyway.For all her proud talk of luthiery when she met Simon Thorn, she’d never thought to consider her value separate from her father’s.He’d set a precedent she had always followed—and it had taken the arrival of an attractive stranger with a horn to make her wonder why.
Hmm.
She eased one of her carving tools over the nearly completed peg, shaving away tiny bits of dense boxwood.It turned easily in her hand, all silent potential.Silence was part of sound and sometimes quite the loveliest part when it allowed one scope for meandering thoughts.
One more shaving, then she tried the peg in its intended spot.No, it wasn’t a perfect fit yet.She needed her magnifying lens to check the surface of the boxwood peg for rough spots.Gazing about the cluttered but organized work space—a place for every board, supply, tool—she saw at once that it was missing from its spot at the end of the worktable.
“Nanny,” she grumbled.
Nanny had got Alice, the maid, to pilfer it again.Rowena would bet on it.Nanny had grown shortsighted over the years, and she’d been impatient to readHow to Ruin a Duke—just as she was to read every other one of the Gothic novels Rowena and her friend Edith passed back and forth.Rowena’s magnifying lens went missing several times a week, and it was always to be found beside Nanny, held over the pages of their latest book.
Rowena set down the tuning peg, then gathered up Cotton—snuffling about on the floor—to keep the hedgehog from the paste jar.Cotton loved to eat paste almost as much as she loved crunching on beetles.More than once, Rowena had found the hedgehog’s little snout daubed with the concoction of flour and water and alum.
Hedgehog bundled in her arms, she marched upstairs to the living quarters.The building stacked up three floors above the shop, but the household rarely used any of the rooms on the top two stories.
Alice squeaked when she saw Rowena turn the bend in the stairs.Duster in hand, she fled into a room off the corridor.
“I know you took my lens, Alice,” Rowena called after her.“It’s all right, but I need it back.”
Alice poked her head forth.“Nanny has it.She’s in the parlor.”
The parlor.An awfully grand name for a room in which they rarely welcomed guests.Nanny had her old friend Mrs.Newland over for tea now and again, but the days of card parties and chattering blue bloods had gone with Rowena’s grandparents.
Alice was right: Here was Nanny in the parlor, a tidy room with cheerful paper on the walls and a worn but still-lovely carpet on the floor.The old woman sat in her favorite seat, a short sofa with a wooden frame and a hard tapestry-covered back.She’d softened the furniture with cushions over the years, each beautifully embroidered.Her swollen feet, cradled in soft slippers, rested on a low footstool.
Nanny had indeed taken Rowena’s lens, setting it on the end table beside her sofa.The magnifier was a big, beautiful half orb of transparent glass set into an articulated frame on a stand.It was unwieldy, almost the size of the book Nanny was reading.Not for the first time, Rowena thought she should get a sliding tabletop magnifier for the household.Just a fat lens that one slid along the page.
But right now, every penny counted.By all rights, Rowena shouldn’t even be subscribing to a library anymore, though a life without Gothic novels and romantic Society tales would be sorely lacking in savor.
If one had no romance or scandal in one’s life—and really, the only good sort of scandal was the sort that came with romance attached—then one needed to find it on the page.And romance had been sadly absent from Rowena’s life for several years, since the abrupt departure of the awkward lover she’d once thought to wed.
