“I suppose he isn’t.” Lucien was both amused and somewhat touched. “Faultless, though, one might say.”
It was a little dig, his own way of exercising Valkirk’s sense of humor.
Valkirk rewarded him with a small, patient smile.
There was his reputation as a sort of national saint. And then there was the man he truly was, which was a good deal more complicated. No one got through war with an unstained soul, especially not a brilliant, effective general. And everyone in this room, save Delacorte, had served in some way.
“I’m not related to any dukes,” Delacorte volunteered. “I’ve a brother, mind, and relatives scattered about Scotland and Ireland. But I’ve sold remedies to apothecaries in London who’ve sold them to dukes.”
Both Lucien and Captain Hardy had privately discussed how they both longed to meet and dreaded one day meeting Mr. Delacorte’s brother, not to mention his other relatives.
“Speaking of other people who allegedly wound up in the drink, but remain among us,” the duke said to Bolt, “I must say I did wonder at the inclusion of Miss Mariana Wylde among the guests, given the rigorous interview process.”
There was a sudden, wary silence and a swift glance exchanged between Bolt and Hardy.
Captain Hardy apparently lost the mute coin toss, so he spoke.
“My wife and Mrs. Durand are kind people possessed of excellent judgment,” Hardy began evenly, “and Miss Wylde was in immediate need of shelter when she came to us as she felt her life was in peril in her own home. They could not find it in their hearts to refuse her. We have so far found her to be a fine and amiable guest. You have my word of honor that our wives and everyone who lives here exercise the utmost care in protecting the privacy of our guests. And should Miss Wylde somehow manage to instigate a duel in the parlor, she’ll be promptly evicted.”
Hardy’s word of honor was worth gold.
But the duke was a little skeptical on one point. “Has anyone ever been evicted?”
“I was,” Captain Hardy said.
“. . . before we were married,” Captain Hardy expounded, faced with Valkirk’s incredulous silence and single arched brow.
“It’s a long story,” Hardy finally muttered.
The silence stretched.
“Wives,” the duke said, finally. Thoroughly, sardonically amused.
Both Lucien and Captain Hardy offered careful smiles.
As a blockade captain, Hardy had run notorious smugglers to ground. He and his men had set fire to all the boats in a village known to have abetted criminals. He was as ruthless and rigidly disciplined a man as Valkirk had ever met.
And he’d gone and married himself an Achilles’ heel.
Valkirk had been the son of a farmer and was a twenty-year-old soldier when he’d wed the youngest daughter of a viscount who’d been over-blessed with five of them. And while it was generally considered that Valkirk, then James Duncan Blackmore, had married well above his station, she was much later congratulated on her foresight to marry a man clearly destined for greatness. Perhaps she’d known. James hadn’t known. He’d only known that when one began life at the base of a mountain, the only option was to conquer the bloody hell out of the mountain. The safest view, the best air, were at the very top.
And so that’s what he’d done.
He knew a sort of steely, immutable pride that his grandchildren, and all who came after, would be safe from harm or struggle or the sort of upheaval and poverty he’d known as a child. He’d made certain of it. From up there, as a sort of lookout, he could keep all of them safe.
It was why, in large part, the presence of Mariana Wylde, of all people, set his teeth on edge. She, and the young men who congregated in the dressing rooms of opera singers, and those that milled about them, were shallow and volatile and reckless, an affront to his life’s work, destined for bad ends and, like people who were drowning, they pulled others in with them. She was pretty, he supposed, in an ordinary way. It was hard to imagine a man shooting anyone over her. Reputations like hers rubbed off on others like newsprint.
“The on dit is that you might be looking for a new one,” Lucien said.
“A new wife?” Delacorte perked up.
“There’s always on dit,” Valkirk said, taking pains to sound bored. “This is nothing new.”
There was a short silence.
“But the acceptance of invitations to dine . . . that’s a little new?” Lucien suggested slyly.
Hardy stared a warning at Lucien.
But Valkirk just shot Lucien a balefully amused glance. “I forgot that at least one of you was a member of White’s.”
Men liked to complain the women were gossips, but men, in his experience, were almost worse. Though he’d found listening to it at White’s had been useful more than once.
Lucien gave a low whistle. “Titled mamas must be all but shot-putting their daughters at you.”
Valkirk handed his empty brandy glass to Hardy, who had gestured questioningly with the decanter in his direction. “It’s really more of an underfoot type of thing. And an every-time-I-turn-around type of thing. And an ‘oh my goodness, I didn’t know you intended to visit the National Gallery today, Your Grace, have you met my daughter, Prudence?’ type of thing.”
He wasn’t unsympathetic. The mating games of the aristocracy were ridiculous on the surface and serious as a guillotine beneath.
He was a mere generation removed from peasants. He wanted a legacy that would withstand the test of centuries, an edifice of extraordinary wealth and power that could not be broken or breached, built from powerful ancient names entwined and intermarried. So if he married again, he’d marry damn well.
It just seemed ironic that he could choose any pretty thing with a title now when his first marriage had been built on gratitude (his) and ambition (mutual). Still, beneath—far, far beneath—the thick armor of cynicism and glory the years had layered on him, there remained something of that twenty-year-old soldier who could not believe a woman had said yes to him when he’d asked.
He didn’t know what he would base a new marriage on.
He didn’t hate the idea of more children.
Or a woman in his bed.
He’d never kept a mistress. That sort of arrangement had always struck him as impractical, improvident, an invitation to chaos. And not only that, dishonorable, if one was married. So few wives were truly ignorant of a husband’s mistress, and even fewer were happy about it if they knew. They merely endured the indignity. This struck him as unjust. Just because a man could get away with something didn’t mean he should.
He had not been a saint throughout his marriage.
But he could not have done that to his wife.
And he definitely wouldn’t do it now, when the nation, still somewhat reeling from a bloody, brutal war, looked to him as their hero, the example of all that was right and good. They needed him to be the man they believed him to be, honorable, decent, brave, a beacon they could point to and say, “Be like him, son.”
“So that’s why you’re hiding here to write your memoirs,” Delacorte mused shrewdly.
Bolt’s and Captain Hardy’s eyes went huge at the word “hiding” directed at, of all people, Valkirk.
With the vision born of decades of peering into the souls of men, Valkirk inspected Delacorte and found not a shred of guile; besides, his own pride was woven into his fiber. In other words, one couldn’t insult him into shooting anyone simply over a feckless soprano who juggled one too many lovers.