Yet . . . he was betrothed. A daring and heretofore undiscovered part of her mind pointed out that betrothal was not the same as marriage.
She glanced back at Mr. Marlowe. The curve of his lower lip was remarkably appealing for a man. His form was slender. He would likely dance extremely gracefully. But no: Vicars don’t dance, she reminded herself.
Joan elbowed her. “Stop ogling him,” she hissed.
Viola looked down at her plate and discovered to her surprise that she’d finished her shortbread. She never ate among strangers and yet . . .
Her stomach felt entirely peaceful.
This must be love, she thought wonderingly.
Love.
Love is miraculous.
If she were a vicar’s wife, she’d have no need of ballrooms, although at the moment she felt brave enough to dance a minuet. In fact, if she married Mr. Marlowe she might never have to enter a ballroom again.
Gladness flooded her body, and she barely stopped herself from gazing at the vicar again, her heart in her eyes.
Perhaps he would never be hers—although some steely part of her was determined he would be hers—but even if not . . .
She could still save him from this dreadful marriage.
He was like her beloved Cleo and Daisy. Like Barty, whom she rescued after he fell from the nest. Mr. Marlowe needed to be saved from the domineering Miss Pettigrew.
She had a mission.
And she was in love.
Chapter Three
The Duke of Wynter’s townhouse
Mayfair
Devin Lucas Augustus Elstan, Duke of Wynter, was not the sort of man who wasted time. Or, rather, as he would have phrased it: not the sort of duke. He had grown up knowing that a duke (or future duke) was as different from the average man as a lion from a tabby cat.
He wasn’t akin to the other lions either. He watched with bemusement as his peers gathered to circle a crowded dance floor, or met at the racetrack for the sole purpose—or so it seemed—of losing money in questionable bets. Being a mathematician, he had walked into a gambling house as a young man, spent precisely one hour there, and walked out considerably richer.
But also bored.
He had been educated in isolation by a series of tutors as befitted the future Duke of Wynter and an only child. Normally, a duke’s son would have met other children at house parties, but due to his father’s reckless propensity for dueling, such invitations had stopped by the time he reached the age of four.
His only acquaintances had been his cousins, especially the two closest to his age, Otis and Hazel. Even so, he saw them rarely, as his father didn’t care to remain in the same house longer than a month or two.
Like Queen Elizabeth in the 1600s, the ducal establishment had moved from estate to estate as the duke’s fancy struck him. While the duchess was alive—she had died when Devin was fourteen—she either engaged in pitched battles with her husband or disappeared for months, choosing to live in more congenial environs.
“The one thing you can say about marriage,” she was fond of saying, “is that not even an idiot is allowed to challenge his wife to a duel.”
Or, Devin might have added, challenge his son.
By the age of ten, Devin had realized that his father’s adherence to that particular tenet of civilization was all that stood between him and a gravestone.
When he inherited the dukedom at age sixteen, it was too late to bother with Eton or Harrow, and he had no time to spare for Oxford. It was too late for friends.
People found him to be cold, arrogant, and uncaring.
He accepted that judgment with disinterest.
To go back to the image of the lions and tabbies, as Devin saw it, strange cats slept by each other in the sun, whereas a lion was only comfortable in the company of his blood relatives.
His pride.
Even the most frustrating ones, which in this case included his cousin Otis.
“Do you really mean to tell me that you’re giving up your living, Otis? St. Wilfrid’s, which I held open for you for the last two years until you finally graduated from Cambridge?”
Otis lounged opposite, looking entirely unrepentant. “It’s easy for you to be so patronizing. As a second son, I’m supposed to find a genteel profession. The law is far too abstruse, and the military dismayingly violent. That left the church. I kept to the scheme as long as I could. My new plan is to move to the continent and woo an heiress.”
“You’ve only been in the vicarage for two weeks. Why are you turning down St. Wilfrid’s?”
“Not just Wilfrid’s,” Otis said. “I’m done with the clerical life, cuz.”
Devin leveled a glance at Otis that had turned the current Lord Mayor of London into an incoherent apologist.
“No use looking at me like that,” his cousin said, grinning. “You’ve known me from the cradle and there’s no point in trying to shame me. It won’t take. If you don’t mind me pointing out the obvious, that should have been a sign that the clergy was never the place for me.”
“Seven years of studying theology at Cambridge en route to becoming a priest, and you’re throwing it away two weeks after ordination. Without trying to make a success of it. Even for you, that’s remarkable.”
Otis leveled a finger at him. “Careful, Dev. You’re cold-blooded by nature, and if you don’t watch yourself, you’re going to become as prickly and mean-spirited as your father.”
“St. Wilfrid’s is an excellent post. With two curates in residence, you scarcely have anything to do other than marry the occasional parishioner and baptize a baby or two. You can’t have given it a proper try.”
Otis grimaced. “I did! I was going along merrily, ready to hand out wise advice to all those who asked, when Gerdsby—that’s the curate who resembles a goat—hauled me along to someone’s house yesterday morning. I’d had too much ale the night before and I wasn’t paying much attention, but when I got there, it turned out I was supposed to give Last Rites.”
“Didn’t they teach you how?”
“There was a lecture that pointed out the right prayer. My tutor made me read it through twice. But it’s not the same when a man is looking at you fearfully and his wife is crying. Even the kitchen maid was crying. I almost joined in.”
“You’d get used to it,” Devin suggested.
“That’s easy for a duke to say,” his cousin retorted. “If you stand around in silk holding a snuffbox, you’ve done the job. But if a man stands around looking like a vicar, people expect him to save souls!”
Otis had a point.
Even if Otis hadn’t been wearing a canary-yellow waistcoat, Devin could see that his cousin would be unbelievable in the role.
“I can’t do it. I won’t disgrace myself by trying again either. Spare sons shouldn’t be shunted into the church with the idea that it’s suitable employment for a gentleman. I don’t know how the rest of them get around the soul-saving part, but I’m not fitted for the role, and that’s that.”
Devin couldn’t disagree.
“Your father will be very disappointed,” he observed. His uncle, Sir Reginald Murgatroyd, had his heart set on his younger son entering the church.
“He made that point repeatedly last night, but as I told him, he’s not the one who is supposed to be clearing the way for people to line up at the Pearly Gates. I don’t know how you can stand it in here,” Otis added, looking about Devin’s study. “I haven’t been in this study for years, and it’s even more ghastly than I remembered.”