Page 4 of A Duke in Disguise
“Her debut?” Verity asked. “I hadn’t realized you had such hopes for her.” During the months that she had been a near-daily visitor in the Allenby household, there had been a steady stream of tutors, drawing masters, French governesses, and all the other staff essential to the raising of elegant young ladies. But Verity had thought Portia simply meant to provide her daughters with a first-rate education, not prepare them to be launched into the upper echelons of society.
“She is the daughter of a marquess. On the wrong side of the blanket, of course, but Ned acknowledged my girls as his daughters. Lord Gilbert acknowledges them as his sisters.”
“And the current Lord Pembroke?”
Portia pressed her lips together. “He’ll take some doing. But my point is that I don’t want to jeopardize that. Pembroke is...” She let her voice trail decorously off.
A stuffed shirt? An unapologetic Tory? Everything that Verity had devoted her life to fighting? She couldn’t help but feel the insult implicit in Portia’s remarks. Of course being a guest in Verity’s home would threaten Amelia’s standing with the very hierarchy Verity wanted to dismantle. That was the entire point. And here Portia was asking Verity to cooperate.
“Lord Pembroke has very precise standards,” Portia said, smoothing the fabric of her gown beneath her gloved hands. “I plan to ensure that Amelia adheres to those standards. Her being brought before a magistrate would quite put paid to all my hopes for her.”
“All your hopes,” Verity repeated. “I thought your hopes were for her to—” Verity silenced herself, suddenly aware that the very sight of her—shabbily dressed and weary—must make Portia even more eager to ensure her daughters had a different fate. She changed tack. “A debut, though. Are you sure that’s what Amelia wants?” Verity had the strong impression that Amelia would prefer idling in the bookshop, arguing with Nate about the rights of man and the merits of the latest Greek translations, rather than dancing at balls and making polite chatter at tea parties.
“What she wants is immaterial. The fact of the matter is that she is a marquess’s daughter. That is her birthright. Heaven knows it’s her only birthright. Every shilling I saved over the years has gone towards making sure the girls had every advantage. The entire point of the salon is to persuade people to associate with us despite our background. In order to have a salon, I have to have a good house and a full staff. Why do you think I did all of that? For my own amusement? No, it was for my girls, to make sure they had the best future they possibly could.” She sighed, causing the feathers on her hat to flutter sympathetically. “Marrying well is the surest way for my girls to be safe and prosperous. Their futures are not mine to throw away.”
“I see,” Verity said. And she did see. She couldn’t blame Portia. Some quiet, traitorous part of her wished her own parents had cared half as much for her as Portia did for her daughters.
“Of course you’re welcome to visit us at our house. At the salon or any time.” Portia managed to make this sound like a genuine invitation, rather than a sop to Verity’s pride.
“But I’ll stop inviting Amelia here,” Verity said.
“Thank you, my dear. And if you would do me the favor of passing that message on to your brother...”
“As you wish.” She tried to keep the bitterness from her voice, but as soon as the words left her mouth, she knew she had failed.
“Don’t be like that, Verity.”
“I’m not being like anything,” Verity protested. “I’m... all right, I’m a bit put out to hear that you want me to bar the door to your daughters. But I see your point.” She let out a breath. “I just wish my brother weren’t carrying on in such a way as to make this necessary.”
“We have to be so careful, otherwise people are only too ready to remember who we are.” While nobody quite forgot that Portia had once been the late Lord Pembroke’s mistress, they had long since decided this was a point they were happy to disregard, so long as they were able to attend her salon. If one had any pretenses to sophistication, one arrived at the pragmatic conclusion that Mrs. Allenby, in her subdued but elegant attire, attended by her genteel and intelligent daughters, was no common bit of muslin. The fact that she never left the house in an ensemble costing less than a hundred guineas surely didn’t hurt matters.
“I’ll do whatever you need me to,” Verity agreed, trying to sound as if she did not mind being forced once again into the position of telling Nate what to do. “But I’ll warn you that Nate isn’t terribly interested in my wishes these days.” She arranged her inkwell so it covered up a blot of ink on her desk.
At this, Portia frowned, an expression of outright concern marring her usually placid countenance. “Your brother,” she said, “has always flown close to the sun.”
When Ash walked into the shop he found Nate tying up a parcel of books for Mrs. Allenby. He was deeply and mortifyingly aware that he would have liked Portia Allenby a good deal more if she hadn’t been Verity’s lover. Ash understood that he and Verity could never be together, and he accepted as the logical and reasonable conclusion that she would seek the company of other people. Indeed, he wished her well, in a theoretical sort of way. He just didn’t want to know about it. It wasn’t envy or even jealousy, he told himself, but one of their distant and quieter cousins; he couldn’t be jealous while warding off the warmer feelings towards Verity that he was susceptible to. And he needed to not only ward off those feelings but banish them to the iciest reaches of his mind. Verity and Nate were dear to him, and he couldn’t let his emotional flights of fancy compromise this makeshift family they had assembled.
As he held the door open for Mrs. Allenby, he saw that the sign over the door was peeling. It was hard to guess that the letters were supposed to spell out Plum & Co. He had the stray notion that he ought to tell Verity, but she had likely noticed months ago. Since returning from Bath, he had been struck by the change in the household: cheap cuts of meat, no fires in the bedrooms, corners that hadn’t been dusted in a good while. TheRegisterwas now printed on a paper cheap enough to see through. Verity was saving pennies against an uncertain future. With the same sense of loss that he had while he watched Roger’s ship sail away, he realized that it was not at all a sure thing that there would even be a Plum & Company a year from now.
“What miseries are you thinking of, Ash? Your face is—” Nate came out from behind the counter, arranging his own handsome face into a tragic mask.
“Economics.”
“Cheerful as ever.”
“You’re one to talk. I read the latestRegisterand nearly walked straight into the Thames.”
“That’s how you’re meant to feel. Then you get to the end—”
“Where you dream of the hopeful future in which Lord Sidmouth is sent to the guillotine?”
“Be fair, Ash.” Nate scuffed his boot on the floor. “I don’t mention the guillotine by name. I just mention that we all know how tyrants wind up sometimes.”
Ash closed his eyes. “You made a pun about heads, Nathaniel.” If he kept going like this, his arrest was inevitable. And if he were convicted, he would be sent away for years, maybe transported, maybe even sentenced to death like those unfortunates in Pentrich. Watching Nate flirt with arrest filled him with the same panicked dread with which he imagined Roger hundreds of miles away.
“I can’t do any more prints for you,” Ash said. In the past he had done at least one satire for theRegistereach month, along with his more lucrative work engraving fashion plates and frontispieces. “Prison wouldn’t agree with me.”
“Oh, quite right, that.” He frowned apologetically, and the expression revealed lines of worry on his face.
