Page 9 of The Duke
It wasn’t until university that Kate had met him again, and together they had managed what her aunt and his mother hadn’t been able to: They had become friends.
But by then, Kate was already beginning to amass the power and wealth that he assumed came with the title. It was the only context in which Richard knew her. He hadn’t known her when Lord Wroth stole her mines. He hadn’t known the devastation, the hopelessness, what it had cost her to throw away everything she had just to slow the juggernaut coming at her.
Let it go?
“No,” she said with cool control. “Anything else?”
He stared at her, shaking his head. His eyes were deep and complicated. He was furious with her. He was sad for her. He worriedfor her eternal soul. And all, she knew, because he loved her. They were family.
He let out a long breath. “If he ever spies the smallest chink in your armour, he will go for you with a lance. He won’t hesitate. He won’t miss.”
He spoke of Lord Wroth. It was nothing Kate didn’t know.
“I’ll be all right,” she said, trying to sound gentle. Richard’s love was, frankly, more than she deserved. “I don’t have a single weakness he can exploit. I’ve made sure of it.”
A knock on the doorframe and a manufactured cough broke the tense, insular mood.
“Forgive me, Your Grace.” It was one of her own footmen from Howard House, in her blue-and-silver livery. “Mr. Hill sent me to inform you a visitor has come to the house, who asks after you with some urgency.”
“A visitor? Who?”
“Mr. Hill, uh, preferred not to say, begging Your Grace’s pardon. I believe it’s a matter requiring discretion.”
Ah. Mr. Murray, at last. He was a competent man she’d hired to obtain some sensitive information regarding the Wroth estates.
She stood and clasped Richard’s hand. “I must be off.”
“Do you want me to come?” he said, then added quietly, “You know you can rely on my support.”
“I know,” she said, unbending enough to give him a warm look. “You’re a good man. We’ll find another way to corroborate the report and improve the lives of those children. But for now, there’s an endless lawsuit that needs my attention.”
The gentle dig made him colour and pull an awkward face. Then he laughed and rolled his eyes, pulling her in by their clasped hands to clap her back. The last of the tension between them eased.
She rode home, leaving the footman to return on foot.
If Mr. Murray had the information she hoped for, it would mean she could appeal a recent ruling in Lord Wroth’s favour. She pushed her horse through the evening traffic, impatient to be home.
This proved particularly difficult when she came onto theStrand, as daytime patrons of the many shops, coffee houses, and pastry cooks hadn’t yet made for home, but nighttime patrons of the inns, clubs, brothels, and theatres had already begun to descend.
The Strand had once been lined with the aristocracy’s great London palaces, in the days when royalty would procession down the broad avenue and the Crown was the unquestioned seat of British power. But Parliament had wrested power from the Crown, and the nobility left in droves for the clean streets and new plumbing of Mayfair.
Now, only two great houses remained.
She cast a troubled look at Wroth House as it loomed into view ahead. Broad, blunt, and Gothic, like a piece of the ancient bedrock on which all London had been built and in which a primordial consciousness still squatted.
She snorted. And society thoughtherthe villain.
Her own house, directly opposite, could not have been more different behind its old street wall. Soaring, bright, and spacious, it embodied the genius of the modern age and the hopes of a brighter future.
As long as there had been an English parliament, the Howards and the Wroths had stood thus opposed. The opposition had its roots in a vicious, bloody struggle for power in King Henry I’s Privy Council, and over the centuries, it had grown into an entrenched, bitter rivalry, made worse by a sixteenth-century cuckolding.
In Kate’s own lifetime, she had seen the devastating effects of it; Lord Wroth seemed to hold, for her, a particular hatred. He had offered her no quarter when she inherited the Howard title, though she’d been a child of thirteen. She had grown into adulthood beneath the extraordinary pressure he’d exerted on her.
Well, she wasn’t a child any longer.
She turned towards home, galvanised anew.
A footman opened the iron gates for her, and she entered the vast forecourt of Howard House at a clattering trot. Shedismounted, then bounded energetically up the steps. Her steward, Mr. Hill, awaited her at the top before the open front doors. She entered without breaking stride, and Mr. Hill followed her inside.
