A Duke in Shining Armor Read online

  “She was kind,” Ashmont had said. “Not in a simpering, sentimental girl way at all, but very matter-of-fact and calm, rather like a fellow. And I must say, I was quite taken with her. And it was no use, when I mentioned her to Uncle Fred later, his telling me I wasn’t worthy of her or up to her brain level and other nay-sayings. ‘That’s up to her, isn’t it?’ I told him. Then I set about the wooing. It was uphill work, I tell you. But she said yes in the end, didn’t she? And wasn’t Lord Fred amazed when I told him. He even clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘So you had it in you, after all.’”

  Ashmont had been elated to get the better of his manipulative uncle for once. However, as Ripley saw it, Lord Frederick Beckingham had seen an opportunity and made the most of it. Telling Ashmont he couldn’t have or do something was a sure way to make him do it.

  Not that it mattered, in the end, as long as Ashmont was pleased and the girl knew what she was getting into. Which she must do, if she was as intelligent as believed.

  The problem was, the wedding didn’t seem to be proceeding as smoothly as it ought, Ashmont was bored with waiting, and a bored Ashmont was a dangerous article.

  Ripley glanced at his brother-in-law. Blackwood—dark, like Ripley, but sleeker and better-looking by far—raised one black eyebrow in inquiry. Ripley lifted his shoulders.

  Blackwood made his unhurried way to them.

  “Don’t see what the fuss is about a hem,” Ashmont said. “At the bottom, isn’t it? Well, then.”

  “If she trips on it and falls on her face—”

  “I’ll catch ’er,” Ashmont said.

  Ripley looked at Blackwood.

  They both looked at Ashmont. He was in his altitudes, beyond a doubt. He had all he could do to stand upright.

  If the bride didn’t appear soon, one of two things would happen: At best, the bridegroom would sink into a stupor and subside ungracefully to the floor. At worst, he’d pick a fight with somebody.

  “’Nuff o’ this,” Ashmont said. “I’m goin’ t’ get her.”

  He started for the door, and stumbled. Blackwood caught him by the shoulder. “Good idea,” he said. “No point hanging about in here.”

  He caught Ripley’s eye. Ripley took the other side, and they guided their friend out of the drawing room.

  With the guests milling about the trays of champagne, they encountered only servants in the passage.

  “Where?” Blackwood said.

  “Downstairs,” Ripley said.

  “Not down,” Ashmont said. “She’s up. There.” He pointed, his finger making unsteady curlicues in the air.

  “Bad luck,” Ripley said. “Bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.”

  “Was ’spectin’ to see her at the weddin’,” Ashmont said.

  They led him toward the stairs, and then, not easily, down them.

  “This way,” Ripley said.

  Though he’d been in Newland House before, that was ages ago. He wasn’t sure of the ground floor layout. In an old house of this kind he’d expect a breakfast or dining room and, possibly, a library. Not that the type of room mattered.

  They needed to get Ashmont away from drink as well as anybody he might decide to quarrel with, which was more or less everybody.

  He and Blackwood guided their friend toward a door standing at a safe distance from the main staircase. Ripley opened the door.

  The first thing he saw was white, miles of it, as though a cloud had slid into what he was distantly aware was a library. But clouds didn’t wear white satin slippers and clocked stockings, and did not stand upon a set of library steps.

  “Oops,” Blackwood said.

  “Dammit, Olympia,” Ashmont said. “What the devil are you about?” He tried to break away from his friends.

  Ripley said, “Get him out of here.”

  “No, you don’t, blast you,” Ashmont said. “Got to talk to her. Can’t botch this.”

  In his present state, this was exactly what he’d do.

  Ripley gave Blackwood their patented What Do We Do Now? look.

  “Bad luck,” Blackwood told Ashmont. “Bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.”

  As he hauled the protesting Ashmont back into the corridor, he said over his shoulder to Ripley, “He put you in charge of wedding details. Do something.”

  “The ring,” Ripley said. “The license. Ready money where required. Not the bride.”

  “Do something,” Blackwood said.

  Once more Ripley opened the door.

  The library steps nearby held nobody. A sound drew his gaze to the windows. He saw a flurry of white. Ashmont’s intended was struggling with the window latch.

  Ripley crossed the room in a few easy strides.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be at a wedding?”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “You might give the blushing bride some help. The latch is stuck.”

  He caught a whiff of brandy mingled with a flowery fragrance.

  Though his brain wasn’t at its sharpest at the moment, he could sum up the situation easily enough: drunken bride at window with the aim of getting out.

  There was a problem here.

  “Why?” he said.

  “How should I know why it’s stuck?” she said. “Do I look like a plumber to you? Or what-you-call-it. Glazier.” She nodded. “Window person.”

  “Not being a window person, I may not be qualified to help with this sort of thing,” he said.

  “Rise above yourself,” she said. “I’m the damsel in distress. And you—” She turned her head to look at him. She stared at the knot of his neckcloth, approximately at her eye level. Then her eyes narrowed and her gaze moved upward.

  Behind the spectacles, her grey eyes were red-rimmed.

  She’d been crying.

  Obviously Ashmont had said or done something to upset her. Nothing new in that. His tongue often got well ahead of his brain. Not that any of them were gifted in the tact department.

  “Plague take it,” she said. “You. You’re back.”

  “Ah, you noticed.” He felt strangely pleased. But champagne usually had that effect, even in small doses.

  “You’re over six feet tall,” she said, tipping her head back. “You’re standing right in front of me. I’m shortsighted, not blind. Even without my spectacles I could hardly fail to recognize you, even at a more distant . . . distance. Which I prefer you were. At.” She made a shooing motion. “Go away. I only want a breath of air. In . . . erm . . . Kensington Gardens.”

  “In your wedding dress,” he said.

  “I cannot take it off and put it back on again as though it were a cloak.” She spoke with the extreme patience more usually applied to infants of slow understanding. “It’s complicated.”

  “It’s raining,” he said with matching patience.

  She turned her head and peered at the window. Rain droplets made wriggly trails down the glass.

  She gave him a grandiose wave of dismissal. “Never mind—if you’re going to fuss about every little thing.” She turned back to the latch and recommenced trying to strangle it. This time it surrendered.

  She pushed open the window. “Adieu,” she said.

  And climbed through, in a flutter of satin and lace.

  Ripley stood for a moment, debating.

  She wanted to go, and he deemed it unsporting to hold women against their will.

  He could go back and tell Ashmont his bride was bolting.

  He could go back and tell one of the men in her family.

  She wasn’t Ripley’s problem.

  She was Ashmont’s problem.

  True, Ashmont had put Ripley in charge of the wedding. True, Ashmont had seemed unusually concerned about getting it right. And true, Ripley had promised to take care of things: hold on to the ring, supply coins as needed, make sure Ashmont did what he was supposed to do.

  Retrieving the bride wasn’t in the agreement.

  She oughtn’t to need retrie
ving.

  Just because she’d been drunk and crying . . .

  “Damn,” he said.

  He climbed through the window.

  Ripley spotted the cloud of white satin and lace an instant before she disappeared into a stand of tall shrubbery and trees.

  He quickened his stride, glancing up at the house windows at the same time. No signs of anybody looking out. The wedding party had gathered on the other side of the house. That was all to the good. If he got her back speedily, they could patch up matters, and nobody the wiser.

  A glance about him showed no sign of gardeners. The outdoor servants must be carousing with their fellows or taking shelter from the rain.

  Ripley was aware of the rain, but it was no more than background. While conscious of its patter upon leaves and grass and footpaths, he concentrated on the bride, who moved at a smart pace, considering the miles of satin and lace and the ballooning sleeves and all the rest of it.

  He didn’t shout, because she wasn’t running yet, at least not flat-out, and he didn’t want to scare her into running or startle her into doing something even more ridiculous, though at the moment he couldn’t guess what that could be.

  She wasn’t dressed for athletic feats—not that women ever were—and the place was something of an obstacle course. Newland House’s gardens were thickly planted and mature. Some of the trees had waved their branches over Queen Anne. On slippery ground, wearing that rig, and more than a little inebriated, the bride was all too liable to get tangled in shrubbery or trip over her skirts or her own feet.

  He was gaining steadily, in any event.

  He was near enough to see her feet slide out from under her and her arms make windmills as she struggled for balance. He was a moment too late to catch her before she lost the battle and went down.

  He grasped her under her arms and hauled her upright.

  She twisted this way and that. Through several thousand layers of dress and undergarments, he felt her bottom make contact with his groin, which distracted him for a moment.

  He was a man. Exceptional bottom, was his first thought.

  Never mind, he told himself. Do the job and get her back.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “Did I make a mistake? Did you want me to leave you lying in the mud?”

  “You’re spoiling my sleeves!”

  The rain beat down on his head.

  His hat was in the house. He felt naked without it. More naked than if he were in fact naked.

  He felt wet, too.

  He let her go. “You’ve already spoiled the dress,” he said. “Mud streaks and grass stains up the back. Looks as though you’ve been having a lovers’ romp in the shrubbery. Well, that will give everybody something to get excited about. It will certainly excite Ashmont. And since I’m the only male in your vicinity, I’m the one he’ll call out. Then I’ll get to tend his dueling wounds. Again.”

  “Punch him in the face,” she said. “He’ll hit back. Then he can’t call you out, not being an injured party.”

  The long veil clung wetly to her head and shoulders. Her side curls were coming uncurled, and the headdress listed to one side.

  Her face spasmed, and he thought she was about to let loose the waterworks, but she stiffened her jaw and lifted it.

  “You can go now,” she said. “I’m perfectly all right. I only want a moment to . . . erm . . . pray . . . on this . . . solemn occasion, which will change my life forever and for the better. So . . . au revoir.”

  He looked back toward the house.

  What had Ashmont done? How bad or stupid was it? Was it better to let her go wherever she meant to go?

  No, that wasn’t part of the agreement. It wasn’t Ripley’s job to think. His job was to make sure his friend’s wedding went off without a hitch. That meant retrieving the bride.

  Ripley turned back to her, in time to see her sprint away, into a path among a thick planting of rhododendrons. In an instant, they’d hidden her from view, except for a dot of white here and there.

  She’d waited until his back was turned—well, his head—and decamped.

  That was . . . enterprising of her.

  All the same, she couldn’t be let to go merrily on her way.

  If she didn’t want Ashmont, she’d have to fight it out with him in person.

  After they’d had time to sober up, that is.

  Ripley went after her.

  Though the wedding party and guests had congregated in the vicinity of the champagne, at the west front of the house, the bride’s eldest brother, Lord Ludford, was looking for his sister.

  Newland House had been built in the early part of the seventeenth century and added to and updated since. The building, which sprawled over a large section of the land belonging to it, was a rabbit warren run amok. The families were close, their ladyships being sisters. Their numerous offspring had run tame in each other’s houses, and everybody was as at home here as at home. Since Ashmont was impatient to get married, and Gonerby House was in the midst of renovations, their ladyships had agreed to have the wedding here.

  They were afraid, Ludford suspected, that if Ashmont waited too long, he’d change his mind. Personally, Ludford would have preferred that. He deemed Ashmont unworthy of Olympia. If she’d run away, Ludford didn’t blame her. On the contrary, that struck him as a wise decision. Also worrisome, however. Respectable girls like Olympia couldn’t go off on their own. Appalling things could happen to them.

  He hoped, instead, that she was hiding in the house.

  Olympia, who’d sometimes spent weeks at a time here with her girl cousins, had a number of secret places to which she’d retreat to study one ancient tome or another, or memorize book sale catalogs. He assumed she’d done that today, though he had no idea why.

  Like his father, Ludford was not a complicated thinker. When he’d noticed his flask had gone missing, he instantly suspected his younger brothers.

  A good shaking, until the teeth rattled, was often enough to extract a confession. But this time, they’d seemed truly mystified. Little Clarence had seemed to know or suspect something, but whatever it was, he wouldn’t say, and he was as stubborn as Olympia.

  Ludford sought out Clarence now, in the nursery, to which he’d been banished after some games leading to broken champagne glasses. Andrew, his partner in crime, had been separated from him, to languish in the schoolroom.

  Ludford flung open the nursery door. “You know something, brat,” he said. “And you’d better own up, or I’ll—”

  He stopped, because Clarence turned away from the window he’d been looking out of, and his face was bright red.

  Yes, he ought to be scared when Ludford burst in on him like that. That was the whole point. But Clarence jumped away from the window as though it had caught fire, and shouted, “No, I don’t! No, I don’t! And you can’t make me!”

  Ludford stormed to the window in time to catch a glimpse of white in the shrubbery and the Duke of Ripley moving toward it, not running, exactly, but not at his usual lazy pace, either.

  Ludford raced out of the nursery.

  On a moonlit night, Ripley would have enjoyed pursuing a merry widow along the garden path’s twists and turns, with the tall shrubbery making the chase more challenging.

  But this wasn’t a moonlit night, and Lady Olympia Hightower wasn’t a merry widow.

  The flashes of white proceeded steadily and at surprising speed at a distance ahead of him.

  As he plunged down yet another path, the white flares disappeared altogether. Then, through the pattering rain, he heard a faint clinking. He kept on, and the tangle of shrubbery gave way to a small clearing that led to an iron gate set in the tall wall.

  A gate she was trying to wrestle open.

  A few soggy strides brought him to her.

  She paused in her labors and looked over her shoulder at him.

  “Oh,” she said. “You.” She panted from her exertions, her bosom rising and falling. “The blasted thing’s loc
ked.”

  “Of course it’s locked,” he said. “Can’t have the hoi polloi tramping through the garden and poaching the rhododendrons.”

  “Bother the rhododendrons! How is one to get out?”

  “Perhaps one doesn’t?” he suggested.

  She shook her head. “We must find another way out.”

  “We?” he said. “No. You and I are not a we.”

  She stiffened then, her eyes widening.

  He heard it, too.

  Voices, coming from what he guessed was the same route he’d traveled.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Too late. You have to help me over the wall.”

  “No,” he said. “Can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can,” she said. “Here you are, and what else do you have to do? Do be of use for once in your life and help me over the wall. And now would be a good time.” She stamped her foot. “Now!”

  Bits of her coiffure had come undone, and tendrils of wet brown hair stuck to her face. The thing on top of her head was now more on the side of her head, and stray rhododendron leaves and dead blooms had become trapped among the apple blossoms. Her veil had snaked around her neck. A smudge of dirt adorned the tip of her narrow nose.

  “Over the wall,” he said, playing for time.

  “Yes, yes. I can’t climb the ivy properly in this dress—and certainly not in these shoes. Hurry! Can’t you hear them?”

  He was trying to devise a delaying tactic, but his brain was slow to help. Then he heard a confusion of cries, and these called to mind baying hounds and angry mobs. At that moment, something in his mind shifted.

  Since his Eton days, Ripley and his two partners in crime had been eluding the forces of authority, along with irate farmers, clergymen, tradesmen, and, generally, all species of respectable persons, not to mention pimps, cutpurses, blacklegs, and others not so respectable.

  “Hurry!” she said.

  He laced his hands together and bent. She set one muddy, slippered foot on his hand, one dirty hand against the wall for balance, and boosted herself up. Then, with an ease that would have surprised him had he been capable of further surprise at this point, she climbed onto his shoulders and reached for the wall.