A Kiss at Midnight
Page 10“I would suggest that he is of a proselytizing nature—”
“Oh no,” Gabriel said. “My brother’s court was overrun by religious types. I don’t want any of those here. You don’t want that, Pole. If I turn into my brother, you and the lion would be out in the cold.”
Pole smiled in a slightly detached way, as if he had been told a joke of extreme indelicacy. “I have faith that Your Highness will not succumb to the delectations of a roving preacher, as did His Majesty Grand Duke Augustus. Mr. Toloose proselytizes in a different arena. I have warned all the younger maids to stay away from the east wing. He has a quite amusing way about him; he was exerting it on the Princess Maria-Therese this morning, but I fancy she was unmoved.”
Gabriel brought to mind his beetle-browed, sixty-year-old aunt, as sturdy and ethical as a German-built boat. “I fancy you’re right about that,” he agreed. “And what is Mr. Toloose looking for in my household?”
“My guess would be that he is rusticating due to debts in London,” Pole observed. “His stockings are quite interesting—a brilliant orange, with clocks—and his coat is worth more than a moderate-sized emerald.”
If Pole said that, it was true. Pole knew all about emeralds.
“All right,” Gabriel said. “Tell Berwick I’m in the gun room and send a note to Toloose requesting his company. I believe my uncle might like to go as well.”
Down in the gun room, he set to polishing the barrel of his Haas. It was a lovely tool, one of the only air guns he’d seen with seven rifling grooves, allowing a man to switch in a moment from hunting deer to hunting pheasants.
The German hunting air gun was everything life wasn’t: beautifully designed, spare, decorative. He didn’t actually care to hunt anything other than game birds and rabbits. But that didn’t mean he scorned the beauty of a Haas, its barrel etched with the coat of arms of the Duchy of Warl-Marburg-Baalsfeld.
His older brother’s coat of arms, to be exact.
A pulse of relief, so old that it felt as familiar as his morning beard bristles, panged in the area of his heart. He’d decided years ago that it was far better to be a prince than a grand duke.
And if not a crown, an heiress. He’d had a letter the other day implying that Rupert, the most handsome of his brothers, was toying with the sister of Napoleon.
His mouth tightened. If Augustus hadn’t lost his mind a few months ago, Gabriel would be in Tunis this very moment, quarreling with his old professor Biggitstiff over excavation of the legendary city of Carthage.
He wouldn’t be sitting in a damp castle in a puddle of summer rain, surrounded by elderly family members and debt-ridden courtiers . . . he’d be sweating in the sun, making sure the dig didn’t turn into a greedy ransacking of history.
Gabriel looked down to discover that he was polishing the Haas’s barrel so hard that he was likely to obliterate the duchy’s coat of arms.
Damned Augustus and his damned ideas. Gabriel had been on the very eve of leaving for Tunis when his brother’s religious fervor burst into flame, inspiring the Grand Duke to expel from his court everyone he considered corrupt, infirm, awkward, or mad.
In short, practically everyone, and all to save Augustus’s self-righteous little soul.
One by one, each of his elder brothers had refused to intercede, either because he was toadying up to Augustus or because (like Rupert) he just didn’t give a damn.
Finally it was left to Gabriel. He could accept a godforsaken castle in England, big enough to house all those deemed too imperfect to grace Augustus’s court, or he could leave for Tunis and never look back.
Put Wick and Ferdinand and the pickle-eating dog and all the rest of them out of his mind.
He couldn’t do it.
Not that he believed it was Carthage. He had wrangled his way into the excavation because he didn’t believe in Dido, the famous Queen of Carthage, or even the existence of the city, for that matter. It was all a myth, made up by Virgil.
And now Biggitstiff was out there in Tunis chortling and labeling half the rocks in the countryside “Carthage.” Hell, by now he’d probably identified Dido’s supposed funeral pyre. The next step would be articles detailing his sloppy assumptions and sloppier fieldwork. Gabriel’s jaw clenched at the thought.
But he had no choice, not really. He wasn’t Augustus, with his religious principles unleavened by a sense of humor. He couldn’t watch everyone he grew up with, from his cracked uncle to his father’s jester (seventy-five, if he was a day), be thrown into the street because Augustus deemed them likely to tarnish his halo.
The only thing he could do was pray that Augustus’s choice for his bride—probably pious and whiskered, as virtuous as she was virginal—had enough backbone to run the castle, so that he could leave for Carthage.
He didn’t really care who she was, as long as she could manage the castle in his absence. Beddable would be nice; biddable was a necessity.
He bent back over the Haas.
Eight
A fter four hours in the carriage with Lord Dimsdale, Kate decided that the most interesting thing about Algernon was that he wore a corset. She’d never dreamed that men wore stays.
“They pinch me,” Algernon confided. “But one must suffer to be elegant; that’s what my valet says.”
Since Kate disliked suffering, she was very glad that the seamstresses had not had time to alter one of Victoria’s traveling costumes to the point of elegant pinching. The one she was wearing bunched comfortably around the waist.
“What have you padded?” Kate asked, eyeing him. He swelled in the chest and shrank down at the waist so she had a good idea.
“Everyone’s costumes are padded these days,” he said, avoiding the particulars. “At any rate, I don’t want you to think that I’d ordinarily discuss such a thing with you, except that you are my family. Well, almost my family. Do you mind if I begin calling you Victoria immediately? I’m not very good with names and I don’t want to become confused in company.”
“Not at all,” Kate assured him. “How does my sister address you?”
“Oh, as Algie,” he said, cheering up. “You should as well. That’s one of the things that I love about Victoria. She never stands on ceremony . . . she started calling me Algernon directly after she met me, and then she shortened it to Algie. That’s how I knew,” he added, somewhat mysteriously.
“Knew what?”
“Knew that she was the one for me. It was fated, really. We felt a wonderful closeness and we both knew.”
It was fated due to the lack of a governess, to Kate’s mind. Victoria’s charming intimacies—verbal and otherwise—were the result of inadequate guidance. She would even guess that Mariana had encouraged various improprieties.