Page 9 of Ne'er Duke Well
Which he was. And she did.
“How did they enjoy London?” asked Daphne. “Remind me again how old they are. I think they’re quite a bit older than our boys, are they not?”
“My sister Lucinda is twelve,” Peter said. “My brother Frederick is ten.” He took this opening to outline in circumspect detail their background—attempting to be mindful offaux passuch as “talking about your father’s sexual escapades in the company of ladies” and “insulting benevolent elderly women.”
“We’ve been laying the groundwork these last two years, preparing legal arguments and encouraging a relationship between Stanhope and the children,” Tagore said. “But we didn’t want to put forth the application for guardianship until His Grace inherited. Once that happened, I petitioned the lord chancellor immediately. Our case is set to go before him six weeks hence.”
Rowland toyed with his cravat. “Eldon is the sticking point. If you’d gotten the new vice chancellor, Plumer, I wouldn’t be so concerned. But Eldon…” He trailed off.
Selina’s brows were drawn together. “Nicholas, I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t Stanhope automatically be granted the guardianship, as you were?”
There was a moment of awkward silence, and Selina’s lips pursed. “I mean—that is to say—I know what natural children are. I understand why the guardianship wouldn’t be assumed.” Peter noted with fascination the flush that slowly worked its way up the fair skin of her neck. In the last two years, he’d rarely seen her blush. Even the first time they’d met—when he’d stumbled upon her in the woods, still damp from bathing in a stream at her country estate—she had not blushed, merely delivered a scorching glare.
He had to admit, he liked that sweet strawberry flush on her skin. Rather alarmingly.
Hehadseen her grind her teeth on numerous occasions, and she was doing that now too. “I simply meant that I don’t understand why this is a problem. Stanhope is a duke. He wants his siblings. What could possibly be the difficulty?”
“The problems,” Peter said, “are twofold. First, my father never formally acknowledged the children. In fact, I don’t believe he recognized them at all. We know from the Stanhope account books that their mother went to my grandfather for financialsupport, not to my father. Between Tagore and my Sussex steward, we’ve produced any number of records that show that the previous duke supported them for years, but they aren’t mentioned in his will or my father’s. For all legal purposes, I might as well be a stranger who’s come to snatch them from the clutches of the court’s noble servant, Great-great-aunt Rosamund.”
Selina took that in with a stubborn set to her jaw. “Nonetheless. We are all here well acquainted with the power of a dukedom. Whyever would Eldon stand in your way?”
“Eldon was born the son of a coal-fitter,” Nicholas said. “He’s rather less impressed by the peerage than you might expect, for all that he’s now Baron Eldon and the voice of the king in the High Court.”
“But what objection could he possibly have to Stanhope’s taking the children?”
“Me,” Peter said, wincing at the bluntness even as he said it. “His objection is me.”
“I see,” said Selina, though her expression said plainly that she did not.
“I have not endeared myself to Eldon this year,” Peter continued. “Or any year, in point of fact. He has a particular sense of English pride that resents the sudden elevation of an American upstart to the highest levels of the government.”
“But your father was English,” protested Selina.
“Yes,” Peter said, “and my mother was French. To many, the latter is more consequential.”
“And, as I may have mentioned,” Nicholas added, “Eldon is a Tory. The worst of them. He hates reformers with a passion. Thinks England was at its best in 1688.”
“It would have been better,” Peter said, “if I had not made that speech in the Lords just after I took my seat.”
Tagore muffled a snort, and Daphne coughed a laugh into her teacup.
“What speech?” Selina asked. “What happened?”
“It was,” Nicholas said delicately, “certainly rousing.”
Peter spun his teacup in its saucer and then watched in some horror as tea arced up the sides of the cup and sloshed onto the porcelain beneath. “I argued for total abolition of slavery across all British colonies. In a few, er, choice words.”
“‘The greatest practical evil ever inflicted upon members of the human race,’ I believe it was,” said Nicholas. “‘The severest and most extensive calamity in the history of the world and an irremediable stain on our national character.’”
“Er,” Peter said. “Yes.”
And though he’d always known that Rowland was perhaps his strongest ally in the Lords on the question of abolition, the fact that Rowland seemed to have memorized the words he’d used to condemn slavery was…
Well, Peter felt speechless for perhaps the first time in his life.
“I begin to see the problem,” Selina said. “You are requesting a favor from a man who is not disposed to like you, whom you have sparred with politically, and who has no legal requirement to give you what you want.”
“All that,” Tagore said, “and then there was the cognac.”
