Page 6 of The Duke Undone

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And so Anthony found himself spinning down a broad lane in the carriage of a man who’d lately shot him in the arm. The silence that pertained between them on the short journey to Forbes’s town house wasn’t any chillier than circumstances required.

Proof. He could not let that stand. If his name was printed in relationship to any scandal, however minor, he’d wake up on March 26 as he’d woken up on March 25, a legal child. Powerless to help his own sister, forbidden from seeing his maternal relatives, sober by fiat.

London blurred behind the window glass. Houses of spotless cream and yellow stone. Stout gentlewomen carrying fluffy dogs. Shopgirls, clerks, milkmen. Beggars, too, even here.

My babes have grown so thin . . .

Those letters from the tenants—they’d taken him by surprise. Last June, when the steamer from Bombay had docked in Southampton, he’d arrowed straight to his family’s seat in Hampshire. He’d been nearly three years from England, and the stables at Stratton Grange felt more like home to him than Weston Hall. He’d needed to ride over the acres of field and forest, for days and nights on end, before he could allow his chest to open, allow himself to breathe like a free man. It wasn’t the homecoming he’d imagined. George, dead. Effie, eloped and abandoned, disowned and vanished. Himself, rescued from prison, and spared public disgrace, by his furious father, to whom he was now irrevocably bonded. Still, as he galloped, spring rain streaming across his face, the raw, fresh smell of torn grass rising warm from the earth, he did feel free, if only for the duration of a few wild heartbeats.

Too soon, Yardley had been sent to collect him. They’d walked together through the village, Yardley striving to put him at ease, striking a cheerful note, pointing out the features of the new cottages, trim structures of brick and slate.

You remember they were hovels, even here in the village, and it was worse on the farms, earth and thatch. I designed these cottages to ventilate. They’re sanitary, healthful buildings, a great improvement.

He’d sounded pleased. He hadn’t mentioned an increase in rents and Anthony hadn’t thought to ask. He’d never concerned himself with estate management, cracked his jaws yawning if conversation turned to land agents, bailiffs, auditors, or surveyors. On every visit to Stratton Grange, he’d inspect the stables from hayloft to harness room, gallop every hunter, scratch behind the ears of the carriage horses and feel their hooves for stones. Beyond that, he noticed little. Did the farmers grow wheat in the fall and corn in the spring or was it the other way around? Or did they grow hay?

Now that it was his duty to notice, he found he hadn’t the habit of it. Or the power to act.

Until those letters, he hadn’t known that his tenants were starving—and freezing—in their modern cottages. Earth dwellings were dank, but they held the heat.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

The carriage jerked and settled. Arrived.

He walked lockstep with Forbes up the stairs and through the entrance hall, which was hung with tapestries, smoke darkened, as though they’d been passed down through generations of Forbeses. Pity they still smelled slightly scorched. No matter how much profit a businessman turned, he couldn’t buy a birthright. As they passed into the study, Anthony loosed a breath, permitting himself one moment of insane speculation. Proof? Did the wife herself wait by the fire in that shepherdess getup, ribboned crook already pointed in accusation? Was he the fool to be drawn into this maddening game?

“Well.” Forbes broke the silence. “Go ahead. Tell me now you never interfered with my wife.”

Anthony turned his head, following Forbes’s gaze. At first, he didn’t comprehend what he was seeing. He narrowed his eyes. What in Christ’s name . . .

He realized his jaw was hanging open and closed his mouth, too hard. His teeth clacked together painfully. Words rushed through his head but refused to order themselves into rational statements. A prank. A stunt. The sort of thing George . . . But George . . . But how . . .

A painting leaned against the wainscoting, just to the left of the door. Light from the windows fell upon it. The heavy gilt frame touched by sun seemed a mass of living sparks. The canvas itself . . . Could the angle be at fault? Did the light play some trick on his eyes?

No. This was no optical illusion.

He approached, muscles tensed, as though something might leap out at him. When he was a foot away, he lowered into a crouch, leaning close enough to see the texture of the paint, the vibrant pigments richly and boldly applied. The central figure—male, nude, recumbent—dominated the scene. The figure was stretched on his back, asleep, one arm behind his head and the other outflung. The artist had given his face, and form, the warm tint of living flesh. The figure looked natural. He looked palpable, ruddy and real.

He looked exactly like Anthony Philby, seventh Duke of Weston.

The breath burst from his lungs. He sprang up and spun around. The very world seemed different. Off-balance. Emptied of its reality. Forbes had come up behind him.

“What a wonderful little joke.” The man stuck a hand inside his coat, no doubt reaching for his handkerchief, or his pistol, before realizing he had neither. Sweat streamed down his forehead.

“Joke?” Anthony echoed the word. It was meaningless. His mind was a perfect blank. Again, the painting drew his eyes. Christ almighty, that was his body painted in its every detail on the canvas. He’d never thought consciously about his proportions. The width and length of his forearms, for example. But he recognized them. The jolt he felt as his eyes swept up and down the canvas was most unpleasant. His chest. His thighs.

“How you must have laughed together,” Forbes said. “Where was she going to hang it? In her dressing room? Where she could simper at you in her dressing gown?”

For the love of God, his cock. No folds of well-positioned drapery protected the figure’s modesty. Everything appeared, as in life. Totally exposed. The muscles in his neck had gone rigid.

“It is you, Weston. I still hoped, until I looked at you in front of it . . . there was a chance . . .”

Anthony scrubbed a hand across his face, which did nothing to disarrange it.

George, at least, had looked a proper heir. He was pale like the Philbys, with that long, thin Philby nose, the blue eyes, the fine blond hair. Anthony and Effie bore too strongly their mother’s stamp. Their father could barely stand to look at them.

“I don’t understand,” he said, hating the admission. He’d never been much for studies. His memory was sharp, but letters had always swum around instead of lining up neatly into words. Reading felt like chasing schools of fish across the page. This sensation he had now, it reminded him of how he’d felt in school as a little boy. Irked. Baffled. Trying to blink some sense into something beyond reason. “God above, what’s the meaning of this?”