Page 26 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
Elsie’s head snapped around.
The ship creaked. Somewhere beyond the wall, a sailor laughed. Inside the cabin, all cheerfulness abandoned Lorenzo’s face with the speed of rats leaving a kitchen.
“Me? Rich?” He touched his chest with insulted innocence. “I am the poorest—”
“You are a della Rocca. Your mother is almost certainly the Duchess of Castelvecchio, unless my memory has become lazy, which it has not. Your family holds land near Monza, villas near the lakes, and at least one palazzo in Milan. You may be poor in the way princes are poor when they cannot immediately purchase Austria, but do not stand in a cabin and tell me you are penniless.”
Lorenzo looked toward the passage. “Would you lower your voice?”
Elsie, who had never been more alive, whispered, “A rich Italian… and handsome to boot.”
Lorenzo stepped into the cabin and shut the door, separating Elsie from the conversation. Then he exhaled and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
“You are more intelligent than I expected,” he said.
“How discourteous. I expected you to be clever at once.”
He sighed and settled against the wall with the ease of a man who had decided to stay a while and was making the best of the architecture.
“Very well. I will tell you a story.”
“Must you?”
He crossed one boot over the other. “Once upon a time, there was a duke.”
She perked up. “Tristan?”
“Heavens, no. To tell Tristan’s story, one requires thunder, tragedy, and a bass voice deep enough to frighten chandeliers. I am, alas, a baritone through and through.”
Marguerite did not sit.
“A very charming duke,” Lorenzo continued. “A man of curiosity and wit and extraordinary leggerezza. One day, he looked at the house, the accounts, the tenants, and the roof, and he decided he could not deal with all that ancestral obligation anymore… So he left. But he had a son. A boy of seventeen. Alone, the boy decided to enter the navy.”
Marguerite could well imagine Tristan choosing prize money because roofs leaked, tenants needed grain, and fathers left.
“He was remarkable,” Lorenzo said. “He took prizes other men said could not be taken. He sailed ships other men said could not be sailed. He won engagements against odds other men calculated and declined. Every coin went to the estate. The roof was repaired. The tenants were kept. The accounts became less catastrophic than before. And the duke’s son became the Sea Wolf.”
Marguerite remembered Tristan on deck, pressing the key into her hand, and her chest tightened.
“Meanwhile,” Lorenzo said, “the duke was having adventures of his own. And in Italy—” He opened his hands. “He found my mother. He fell in love with her. He stayed, and he was happy in the way of men who follow their nature without too many concessions to obligation. He wrote to the boy in England. Letters. Money, when he had it. He meant well. But he was—” Lorenzo sighed. “Insufficiente.”
Insufficient. How many lives were made from insufficient love? It came in letters, explanations, intentions, gifts sent late, but never in the quantity needed to keep a child warm.
“And then,” Lorenzo said, “in this warm Italian life, there was another son. Growing up in a house full of marble and sunlight, hearing stories about the Sea Wolf.”
He went still for a moment.
“Two years ago, the duke died. I was left with everything except—” He looked down at his hands. “The brother I had never met. And I felt that he was missing from me. Lui mi mancava,” he said, and his voice sounded graver in Italian.
Marguerite’s throat closed. How very Italian. To miss someone who had never given him anything, never promised anything, never even known he existed. Her eyes stung, and she lowered them quickly, smoothing one thumb over the seam of her glove as if the leather held some secret. “So the prince set out to find him?”
He nodded, the fairy tale closing in on itself.
“And the Sea Wolf?” she asked.
Lorenzo looked away. “The Sea Wolf was in the market for prizes, not brothers. The prince, being incredibly intelligent, understood Tristan’s philosophy. Cut excess when sailing in a gale. Cut the mast if the ship must live. Cut sentiment before it weakens discipline. Cut everything superfluous.” He looked at her then. “A brother he had never asked for, arriving with a fortune? Superfluous.”
The word struck harder than he had made it sound.
