The Tattooed Duke Page 10

  “The thought did cross my mind that a gentleman would,” Wycliff said, turning from the window to face his traitorous friend. “Then the newspapers reminded me that I was not a gentleman. So no, I don’t think I will congratulate you.”

  “Oh, come now, Wycliff. Don’t be a sore loser.” Burke attempted a laugh that fell flat. Harlan exhaled a gray slip of smoke.

  Wycliff stepped forward and said, bitterly, “I had thought you were a friend.”

  “You thought you were the only adventurer with his sights set on Timbuktu? With that offer of ten thousand pounds, everyone and their mother is angling to go.”

  “I hadn’t realized it was in your sights. But then, it’s not as if we had discussed my plans for my trip. Extensively. In detail. Over the course of months.” They had done exactly that. From his seat, Harlan nodded in agreement.

  The voyage from Tahiti to London was a long one, and the three of them had shared meals, drinks, card games, and smoked together under the brilliantly starry skies over the ocean. And they had talked. That Wycliff intended to be the first to arrive at Timbuktu and return had been a subject of many conversations. As had the details—the routes to take, the supplies required, languages, strategy, customs, tribes one would encounter. Burke had taken this knowledge and this dream.

  The thief.

  “Yes, we did talk about Timbuktu. On my ship,” Burke added, leaning against the mantel and looking pointedly at the decanter of brandy that Wycliff purposely had not offered to his guest.

  “Your point?” Wycliff challenged.

  “I am the one with a ship. A crew. Experience,” Burke said, and when Wycliff opened his mouth to protest, Burke kept going. “Experience leading. You skipped from here to there, frolicking and debauching, one thing to another with no determined course of action, and responsible for no one but yourself.”

  “You’ve been reading the papers, too,” Wycliff said, strolling over to the sideboard to pour himself a drink. He did not offer any to Burke.

  “I was there, Wycliff. I saw and heard more than I cared to.”

  “Funny how that detail—you up to your neck in debauchery with me—never makes it to print.” Perhaps he could make it happen by bringing it to Knightly’s attention. Now that was a letter to the editor he would like to write. He smiled bitterly at the thought.

  “Yes, but who would believe it, to look at me?” Burke asked, looking every inch the perfect, polite gentleman who was on time for church, decorous to women, and never indulged in vices.

  “You look like a stuffed-up prig,” Harlan chimed in.

  “Exactly,” Burke beamed.

  “Duplicitous. On so many counts,” Wycliff remarked. He sipped his brandy and made a great show of savoring it. Burke scowled.

  “You weren’t going to be funded anyway, and for reasons that have nothing to do with me,” Burke pointed out. To what purpose other than to rankle, Wycliff knew not.

  “I don’t find that remotely consoling. However, I hope it assuages your guilt. Which, needlessly to say, I hope is eating you alive.”

  “This conversation is proceeding exactly as I expected it would,” Burke said calmly, but color was rising on his cheeks.

  “It’s the money, is it not? The lure of ten thousand pounds has you ready to throw your old friend under the carriage wheels. What do you even need the funds for? Is your father no longer paying your bills? Do you have secret gaming debts that your captain’s salary won’t cover? ”

  “I would like to marry.” He said this quietly, in such a painfully honorable manner that it simply annoyed Wycliff more than anything.

  “Ah, a noble quest to win a lady’s hand,” he remarked dryly. There was nothing worse than a deceitful friend, except one who deceived for a noble reason like love.

  Burke shrugged. “That, and to be in a position to afford her.”

  “Who is she?” He had to ask. There was no way he could not ask.

  “She is my reason for everything. My north star. My secret,” Burke answered.

  Wycliff rolled his eyes. For some reason, he thought of Eliza, and downed the rest of his drink.

  “I see that you are in no mood to converse about this—” Burke said shortly.

  “I am shocked you thought I would be,” Wycliff stated dryly.

  “My expedition will leave in a fortnight. I will need a crew,” Burke said, with a pointed look at Harlan, and then his gaze settled on Wycliff.

  “You’ve come to the wrong place, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Wycliff told him.

  “Then I’d better be on my way,” Burke replied evenly. He took his leave, and Wycliff loudly wished him the best of luck as he quit the library.

  “So the trip is off?” Harlan asked, still puffing away at his cheroot.

  “No. I will find another way,” Wycliff said, scowling. “There is always another way.”

  His glance fell on his desk. Particularly on a certain letter amidst all the maps, travel accounts, drawings, and account books. It was from Lady Shackley. The lovely, lively, and evil Lady Althea Shackley. Temptation called like a siren song.

  “I hope you think of something, because all I can think of is resorting to highway robbery,” Harlan said. It wasn’t the worst idea ever. But Wycliff had a better one. The siren song tugged at his heart, his brain.

  “Or marrying money,” Wycliff said.

  “I’m not really the marrying kind,” Harlan said flatly.

  “I could be. Especially if I shall be spending the honeymoon en route to Timbuktu. Sans bride.”

  “How are you going to go about getting a rich bride, given your reputation? If the old windbags at the Royal Society are gossiping about you, just imagine the chits in this town. Their jaws must be hurting,” Harlan said with a naughty pause, “from all the talk.”

  Wycliff grinned. The letter from Althea was just there on his desk, requesting that he call upon her.

  “Your concern for my reputation and marriageability makes you sound remarkably like Basil. But this title has to be good for something. Surely one could overlook my unsavory, scandalous aspects for the prospect of being a duchess.”

  “I think we need Basil’s help. Where is he now, when we could use him?”

  “Likely at his club losing vast sums of money at card games. But we needn’t call him in just yet,” Wycliff said. There was another option. A risky, dangerous possibility. One that had worked before. He held up the letter. “Shackley money?”

  Never, in the history of the world, had a doorknob been so thoroughly polished. Never, since the flood, had a spot of earth been so meticulously dusted, cleaned, shined, and otherwise tended to. Eliza stood outside the library door, conveniently left ever so slightly ajar, cleaned and eavesdropped. Shamelessly.

  It was almost too easy.

  She saw an opportunity for her column to make amends. Or possibly avenge the duke. Or perhaps she might throw a wrench in his plans to marry Lady Shackley. Why did that affect her so strongly? It made her stomach positively knot up.

  Her heart hurt for him, with all of these setbacks: first the Royal Society’s rejection, and now Burke’s usurpation. The staff gossiped during the late hours in which he wrote papers detailing the cultures and customs he had encountered, among other things—and all the late hours in which she was unable to sneak back into the library to illicitly read his journals. All the hours he spent cataloguing the strange items he’d brought back. The sunny afternoons when he stayed inside with his account books, determining what could be sold to raise money to cover the estate’s debts—ones not even of his own making, but his cross to bear nevertheless. And the blasted hours he was locked away in that room . . . doing what?

  Her efforts at lock picking had been unsuccessful. As much as the duke confided in her, he did not take her beyond that threshold. It was one of the thoughts that kept her up at night. She didn’t dare sneak out again, not after that kiss that awakened all sorts of desires and feelings that did nothing but complicate ma
tters.

  Eliza knew, too, that he often escaped to the roof after hours to look for stars and breathe in the cool night air. It tortured her: should she go to him? Sometimes she did. Should she stay away? Absolutely—that way lay danger in so many ways.

  Would he knock on her door? She hoped not, as often she, too, saw the far side of midnight. Her column didn’t write itself, and “writing scandal-mongering newspaper columns” was never listed among her duties as housemaid.

  But the truth was: she wanted him to knock on her bedchamber door. She wanted it with an intensity that was unbecoming in a lady. She feared it and craved it in the same breath. It came down to one thing, really.

  She wanted to be near him, with him. So long as she could write her column, she could stay here. The minute her disguise was revealed, it was back out on to the streets of London, and the loss of the story that made her writing career.

  It made sense to her in an odd, tortured way. Because she craved him, she had to betray him. And yet . . . perhaps she could use her column for his benefit instead. Burke and the Royal Society ought to brace themselves, she thought.

  Especially if the duke was thinking long and hard about Shackley money. Particularly, marrying it. This affected Eliza in a most peculiar manner: her stomach literally ached at the prospect and she dared not examine why.

  Later that evening, she feverishly composed another installment of “The Tattooed Duke.” She wrote with half a mind to salvage his reputation. She wrote with jealously of Lady Althea gnawing at her heart. She wrote, desperate to hang onto her position at The Weekly and desperate to stay in the duke’s employ. She wrote as if she might somehow make him forgive her this betrayal and possibly love her. She wrote, eager to again experience that sweet triumph of success, and dizzy at the prospect of more. She wrote as if the words scandal equals sales were tattooed across her heart.

  Chapter 20

  Bittersweet Success

  Offices of The London Weekly

  “Ladies first,” Knightly said as Eliza slipped into the last empty seat. Her heart was pounding, and not just because of the mad dash to arrive on time. She had seen a ghost, just outside the pub across the street. The long-lost Liam whom she had not seen since Brighton, all those years ago. What was he doing here after all this time?

  “Ladies late,” Grenville muttered. What an old crank. She would have said something, if she weren’t gasping for breath. Instead she gave him the same disapproving look Saddler tended to dole out to the servants.

  “Eliza, all of London is on tenterhooks for the latest installment of your column on the Tattooed Duke,” Knightly began. “Myself included.”

  “It’s true,” Julianna cut in. “At all the parties, it’s the only thing anyone talks about. It pains me that I cannot boast of my connection to you and The Weekly.”

  “But there are major issues facing the nation,” Grenville cried. “Does not the aristocracy concern themselves with pertinent matters?”

  “Not at parties, dear old Grenville,” Julianna said sweetly. “It’s where all the lords and ladies gossip about each other and prowl about for husbands, wives, and lovers. There is no speaking of anything serious. That’s what Parliament is for.”

  “Apparently, our members of Parliament are whoring and roving around the world and tattooing themselves like heathens and savages. It’s a disgrace,” Grenville grumbled.

  “It’s sales,” Knightly stated.

  “Scandal equals sales,” the entire staff recited obligingly. It was the governing principle of the paper, and it had made Knightly’s fortune and served them all well.

  “As you are all aware, The Weekly outperforms all the other London papers. But last week’s edition . . .” Knightly paused, so obviously proud and at a loss for words. “We had a second printing by Monday. By Tuesday afternoon there wasn’t a copy to be had. And today the presses are churning out more copies.”

  All eyes turned to Eliza. In her hands was the only copy of the third and next installment of “The Tattooed Duke.”

  Eliza handed over her copy. The room fell silent, save for the crackle of the pages as Knightly unfolded the installment. And then, he began to read aloud.

  “ ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in want of a fortune must be in search of a wife. The new Duke of Wycliff has his eye on the marriage mart, in the quest for a rich spouse. One in particular, in fact. His debtors and creditors no doubt are of the same inclination.’ ”

  “Oh, Eliza,” Julianna murmured.

  “Why ‘oh Eliza’?” Annabelle asked. “All she wrote was that he is looking for a wife. That’s not tremendously remarkable. Or is it?”

  “While it is true that many peers are poor, and many a marriage is simply a transaction . . .” Julianna began, and the men in the room took this time to think other thoughts. But Knightly paid attention. “. . . one might be given to understand that a dowry is a factor in a contracted nuptial. But one does not just say it aloud.”

  “Or print it up for all of London to see,” Sophie added.

  “We do. The Weekly does.” Knightly was firm.

  “He will never find a bride, then,” Julianna replied, just as certain. “The duke has almost nothing to recommend him.”

  “The title isn’t enough?” Eliza asked hopefully. She had just assumed that somewhere there was a girl who would overlook anything to be a duchess. And while she did not intend to destroy his chances at marriage, she knew this column suffered from her petty jealously. And longing.

  “It’s his saving grace, no pun intended,” Julianna replied. “That, and that he is not hideous. But he looks strange, and keeps odd company. We are given to understand that he has gone native.” The Weekly expert on High Society continued with her deconstruction of Wycliff’s dire social situation as the Writing Girls listened avidly. The rest of the staff idly paid attention. “His attire is not at all the fashion, and his appetites, shall we say, seem insatiable and unusual. How is any London belle to endure? Who would hand off their daughters—and their dowries—to a scandalous, possibly savage recluse?”

  “His best hope was for a love match, when anything may be forgiven,” Sophie explained.

  “But who can fall in love with a known fortune hunter?” Annabelle concluded.

  “So this shall ruin him?” Eliza asked, vainly hopeful the answer was no. She didn’t want him to marry Lady Shackley, that was all, but she didn’t want to ruin things more either. This column was supposed to help him!

  “Well, what is the rest of it?” Julianna inquired.

  “The bit about Lady Shackley,” Eliza said, cringing. “And Monroe Burke’s mission on behalf of the Royal Society. And how the duke wishes for funds to outfit an expedition to Timbuktu.”

  “Shall we make him respectable, Julianna?” Sophie asked. “We’ll invite him to balls and waltz with the Tattooed Duke. Our husbands can take him to White’s, where they can respectably drink, complain about Parliament and their wives, and generally not do anything scandalous.”

  “Your husband could do that,” Julianna replied, and then in a far lower tone, “Mine is delightfully incapable of proper behavior.”

  “Does respectable sell?” Knightly asked. And that answered that.

  Next to her, Eliza practiced her inscrutable expression, while inside she seethed with something . . . because her friends had wonderful, loving husbands and popular newspaper columns of their own, and lots of pretty dresses and the ability to just make someone respectable. She had tried, with this column, but apparently it would backfire. She was such a fool.

  The meeting continued. Grenville led a passionate oration about parliamentary issues, probably to make them all suffer some intelligent conversation after the passionate, frivolous debate about the Duke of Wycliff’s matrimonial prospects. The other writers reported on the latest accidents and offenses: a madman escaped from Bedlam terrorizing young ladies all over London, the theft of a diamond necklace from Lady Mowbry’s home at Berkeley S
quare, a fire at a bake shop in High Holburn.

  All the while, Eliza thought about leaving. She was mostly sure she had seen that devil from her past, Liam, lurking outside. Had it been her vivid imagination, coddled by a lifetime in the theater? Or could she trust her own senses? After all this time, she’d thought he would be dead. Or hoped he was, that ruthless, thieving bounder.

  But there he was, loitering outside the pub. It must be a coincidence.

  But his eyes had met hers. She had seen him. Why?

  She knew she would have to find out later, for Knightly called her into his office for a private interview after the meeting. The last time she’d been here . . . she shuddered. Knightly had put the fear of God into her that day—or to be more precise, the fear of life without being a Writing Girl, life without the work she loved.

  “Eliza,” Knightly said briskly. “Sit.”

  She took a seat on one of the large upholstered chairs before his desk. They were of a proportion more suitable for a man, and thus made her feel unbelievably small and insignificant. It was probably unintentional, she thought, for Knightly likely hadn’t decorated his office with the intention of doing business with women.

  Then again, he was a man to employ every advantage.

  “I want to discuss your column,” he said.

  She waited a beat for him to continue.

  “I should let you know that I have decided to make ‘The Tattooed Duke’ a regular column. ‘Miss Harlow’s Marriage in High Life,’ ‘Fashionable Intelligence,’ ‘Dear Annabelle,’ ‘The Tattooed Duke.’ All by Knightly’s Writing Girls.”

  The news left her speechless. A wave of relief surged over her—she would not be fired! She would not lose her livelihood! And then her heart might have ceased to beat for a moment. In fact, her heart felt like it might explode with pride.

  “You ought to have an increase in your wages as well,” Knightly continued, and at that, Eliza beamed. She smiled so hard, so true, so wide, that her cheeks ached. She was back from the edge. She had written herself out of disaster and back into success. All it took was a good story—Get the story, get the story—and a good disguise. And the right subject.