What he wanted was a woman who saw him as a title and a bank vault. The kind of wife who would, when afforded certain enviable comforts, bear him an heir and not expect him to take more than a strictly legal interest in the proceedings. The kind of woman who would not require an investment of emotion he was not equipped to give.
Toward the bottom of the stack, an entry caught his eye. Miss Gillian Bastian, of Philadelphia.
“From the colonies?”
“Oh, Miss Bastian? She’s gorgeous but has the conversation of a parakeet. Her parents are so mad for her to find herself a title that I asked her out of charity. I was thinking of her for Lord Apthorp.”
A man did not come to rule the City of London without knowing an opportunity when he saw one. He closed the book. “There we are. Give Miss Bastian a nice room.”
Constance snorted. “Miss Bastian? Did you hear a word I said? I doubt you could stand her for an hour.”
“They all sound qualified. Put them in whatever rooms you like.”
Constance snatched back the reports. “Qualified. How unromantic, Archer—even for you.”
“I’m not looking for romance. I’m looking for a wife.”
She curled her lip. “You are never more His Grace,” she said, referring to their late father, “than when you profess such horrifying statements.”
Given she had hardly known their father, Archer knew she said this because she had deduced comparisons to the man were the surest way to rile his temper.
“I am marrying precisely to ensure that our tenants are spared a recurrence of the conditions that plagued them under His Grace’s stewardship,” he said, in his flattest, most arctic tone. “Never mind what should become of you if, God forbid, Wetherby gets his hands on the title.”
“Please. You are scarcely four and thirty and he must be at least sixty.”
“Smallpox does not discriminate by age.” It had taken the life of his previous presumptive heir, a distant cousin whose death at the tender age of twenty had put Wetherby in line for the title and necessitated the farce of this quest for a wife in the first place.
“It’s been a year since Paul died and you’re still with us. Surely, you can afford yourself another month or two to find a wife who actually suits you.”
“Having no wife suits me, so I’d bid you to content yourself that I’m marrying at all and find me a proper candidate for duchess. The duller and more willing, the better.”
“I’m sure you’ll get exactly the duchess you deserve with an attitude such as that. And what an awful waste.”
She left the room with a toss of her blond head.
He leaned back in his chair, grateful to be left in peace.
His sister was right. With any luck, he would get the duchess he deserved.
One who understood that marriage was a cynical pursuit. That he would invest no more in the arrangement than name, coin, and seed. Attachment—love—would not factor.
He had tried that condition once. The consequences had been such that he’d go to great lengths to never suffer them again.
He reached beneath his neckcloth and ran his fingers along the leather cord he wore around his neck. The jagged iron key it held was cool against the surface of his skin, a reminder of what hung in the balance. His salvation. His sanity. His secret, private self.
His wife would be granted more than most women could hope for: her freedom, his title, and his wealth. In return he asked only for a womb and a lack of curiosity.
For however much he was prepared to sacrifice for duty, this key would not be among his losses. He had responsibilities, after all. He required the strength to meet them.
No one need know the depths from which he drew it.
Least of all, his future wife.
Chapter 4
Her hem was frayed.
She’d only noticed now, stepping down from the ducal carriage.
Bollocks. Poppy rarely went anywhere in her good gowns, but she had considered them rather lovely. In the shadow cast by the imposing house, she suddenly saw her gray muslin for what it was: a tattered imitation of gentility.
She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath, her neck held high. After holding her own with the duke and Lady Constance, she would rather expire than seem intimidated by the immensity of their house, but it was rather difficult to remain impassive when the doors alone were three times the height of a well-built man. They swung open, revealing a phalanx of footmen and an inner atrium that would rival the royal palace for the sheer expense of its finery. It made the modest comforts of Bantham Park look like a workhouse.
“Lady Constance, Miss Cavendish has arrived,” the footman informed her hostess, who was seated at an ornate writing desk, scribbling with an intense degree of focus. Lady Constance turned, revealing that today her blue eyes were framed by a pair of spectacles. She wore a diaphanous summer gown made of a fabric so fine that it floated around her like a corona when she rose to greet Poppy. The delicate fabric was faintly smudged with the same dark ink that covered her fingertips and, here and there, her cheekbones.
“Miss Cavendish,” she said, filling the room with a smile of genuine warmth, “welcome to Westhaven. I hope you can forgive me for imposing on your time, for I wish for us to be great friends.”
Poppy curtsied, somewhat taken aback by this speech. “A pleasure, my lady.”
“Oh, do please call me Constance! We’re really quite informal here.”
“So it seems,” Poppy said, allowing her gaze to fall from the friezes along the ceiling, to the floor-length gilt-inlaid windows, to the India carpet on the floor, as soft and thick as a mattress.
“Join me for a cup of tea before we begin.” Constance gestured to a sofa upholstered in silk finer than any dress Poppy had ever owned.
“I had envisioned the garden beginning here, at the reception, such that the guests must follow the trail of greenery to the ballroom,” she said as she proffered a bowl of delicate porcelain.
Poppy looked up and felt her stomach drop. The room was the size of a modest cathedral. It would take the contents of six greenhouses to fill it.
“What an inspired idea,” she said lightly, hoping she might change the young lady’s mind once she had a better understanding of her thinking.
Constance smiled, and the expression in her eyes was not one that suggested a habit of yielding to compromise. “My ambition, Miss Cavendish, is to leave every guest agog with wonder. I hope you will let your imagination run absolutely rampant. No idea is too grand or too whimsical.”
Poppy hoped her face did not betray her mounting horror as Lady Constance led her through a colonnaded corridor to a ballroom that could easily accommodate the entire population of Grove Vale. “I do love carnations and tulips, but I hate to be ordinary. Maxwell says you are known for exotics, so I will leave it to you to dazzle us with your most unusual plants from abroad.”
Maxwell was clearly out to get her. Poppy’s nursery was known for exotics. Namely, trees. She could not very well fill a ballroom with two-year-old saplings.
“The motif will indeed need to be unusual to match the … singularity of the space,” she said, racing through her modest inventory of flowers. Her hydrangeas and roses were blooming, which was fortunate as they were elegant and durable. With more warning, she could have ordered plants from nurseries elsewhere. But with less than a fortnight, there simply wasn’t time.