Page 31 of The Duke Decides

“His past may be an impediment to others, but it should not be to him,” Louisa said, sitting with a straight back and squared shoulders. “All these charities I pointed out—all those residents have some story of misfortune and woe. I daresay none of them would agree they should be barred from a promising future on the grounds of what they have previously endured in their life.”

The fierce conviction with which she spoke, the fire in her eyes, moved him. He understood. “So you do not believe my past should bar me from being a duke.”

“It should not prohibit you from being a good duke,” she emphasized, “and contributing to the world however you might.”

His heart, that organ he had long thought dulled by care and immovable in his breast, stirred. For the first time, Gabe did not feel like a pretender in fashionable society as his coupe paused in the line of carriages fronting the Surrey Theatre. The colonnaded entrance and the tall arched windows were not doorways to a world so foreign he did not yet speak the language.

His horse was as fine as any horse in these ranks, and his lady, if he did say so himself, was the most beauteous. Louisa laid her hand on his arm and, with utter composure, as if she attended the theater every night of her life, swept into the lobby and looked as if she belonged there, a complement to the soaring elegance and fine furnishings.

He tried to consider it, that this could be his life now. He, in a tailcoat and top hat, at the theater with a beautiful, cultured woman at his side. He watched her totally absorb herself in the play, a popular nautical melodrama called Black-Eyed Susan. Gabe gathered the gist of it was a naval man returning from the Napoleonic wars to find his wife pursued on all sides by grifters, smugglers, and the man’s own sly captain.

He wasn’t certain of the moral, as it all played out: that an honest man would always face struggle in the world, and every scoundrel would covet a lovely woman? He could believe both, especially when he saw the many curious appraisals of Louisa, and him with her.

“Stop doing that,” Louisa said out of the side of her mouth as they stood in their box during the break before the next piece, a harlequinade or some such. Their visitors were men who knew him, cronies come to inspect his companion, and no doubt already preparing to tease him that he meant to put his leg in the shackle. Well, he needed a duchess, didn’t he? The Dowager said so. His mother said so. Orde said so.

Even the royal dukes had done their part and made respectable marriages in the end, though it hadn’t done them much good in begetting heirs. There would be a new King in the course of time, and a new Queen consort. Gabe could see Louisa at his side at the coronation, flowing in her robes of purple, donning her own coronet at the auspicious moment. She could as easily be Queen, with that composure of hers.

He was a bit alarmed, he would admit, by her important friends. The Marchioness of Arendale, famed for her singing, was one; she’d been a sensation in her day, and could still pack a theater on her own. “The Marquess has long been a director on the board of the Foundling Hospital,” Louisa whispered after the Marchioness and her graceful companions had taken leave, “but she’s been kind to our establishment as well.”

The Marchioness of Waringford paused for a word, and Louisa took her hand as if they were old friends. “You must come again when you have time, my lady, and tell us what you think of our gardens,” Louisa said. “The bee orchids are in flower.”

Lady Waringford made promises and gave a small smile to Gabe, who racked his brains to place her. She was an author, some books on plants, beautiful plates and discoveries that botanists had rather gone on about. The Marquess of Waringford was an eccentric too, pottering about with old ruins and calling himself an archeologist.

Louisa Bickford, Matron of the Benevolence Hospital, had eccentric and high-ranking friends.

What would those friends think of her being courted by a rackety, barely respectable duke? He had thought he was elevating her by his public attentions, but Louisa moved in circles he’d never guessed. She already had a foothold in the Polite World, far more so than he did.

And she had a stature and influence of her own. In the elegant papered foyer, as Louisa wrapped in her shawl, another set of women made a beeline toward them. Louisa introduced the one at their head as Henrietta Bales, wife of Lord Darien Bales, the rogue whom London Society still, with private amusement, called Lord Daring.

As they fell into a discussion of the agenda for the next meeting of the Hospital’s board of patrons, Gabe gathered that Lady Darien Bales was one of those terrifying women who did not merely decorate aristocratic circles but threw her weight into political rings where she could be a force for change.

Louisa would be just such a duchess. She would not be content, after running a charitable institution, to simply plan parties and meals for a ducal household. As a duchess, she too would be a force in London, in all of Britain.

He wanted her at his side. The knowledge shocked him into momentary silence. He’d devised this provisional courtship as a way to draw her close. It had taken a scant few hours in her company to realize she was the woman he wanted in his life.

He stood for a moment trying to take that in. Reorient his life around this solid new knowledge, this fresh goal that offered a root and stability of the like he had never known.

It would be impossible to win her. This beautiful, accomplished woman who was hiding some secret of her own so dark and terrifying that she was being blackmailed for it. She’d never see him as worthy of her.

He had to try.

“Stop doing what?” he asked as their carriage approached, lantern bobbing through the night, and he lifted her to the seat.

“Stop behaving as if you were an interloper. A wolf let into the sheep pen. You belong here as much as anybody.”

But he’d never belonged, and he’d never felt he belonged, until he had Louisa at his side.

“It is simply so different,” he said. “From anything I’ve known.”

He told her, then, as the carriage rattled down Westminster Road to Kennington Lane, to come at Vauxhall from the east. Vauxhall he knew, and he felt no strangeness as he paid their shillings at the coach gate, only the wonder as he ushered Louisa inside and she beheld the Grand Walk lined with its hundreds of lighted glass lamps. He wanted to show her everything: the Turkish tent, the lavish interior of the Rotunda, the Orchestra that rose like a tiered Moorish crown. He’d felt that same wonder, arriving in Britain for the first time.

He wanted to show her a life that would fill her with this wonder always.

And he wanted her, of all people, to know him. His past as well as his present.

As a boy growing up in the narrow streets of Alexandria, crawling over monuments to the ancient Egyptian dynasties, the Greeks, and then the Ottomans, Gabe had lived in the shadow of fallen greatness and vanished wealth. His mother had been reared in a comfortable home, and she had lived in luxury with her first marriage as the lesser wife of a high-ranking Mameluke official. Had things gone on as planned, Gabe might have been born a true son of Egypt, and stayed there to rule.

“What happened?’ Louisa asked as they strolled past the arcade with the Chinese temples.