The Inconvenient Duchess

portion of blame for the sorry life this child has led. Rescue her now. Set her back up to the station she deserves and I’ll pray for your soul. Turn your back again and I’ll bring the girl to Devon myself to explain the circumstances to your family at the funeral.
    Cecily Dawson
    He sat back on the bed, staring at the letters in confusion. Blackmail. And, knowing his mother, it was a case of chickens come home to roost. If she had been without guilt, she’d have destroyed the letters and he’d have known nothing about it. What could his mother have done to set her immortal soul in jeopardy? To make her so hated that an old friend would pray for her damnation?
    Any number of things, he thought grimly, if this Cecily woman stood between her and a goal. A man, perhaps? His father, he hoped. It would make the comments about the succession fall into place. His mother had been more than conscious of the family honour and its place in history. The need for a legitimate heir.
    And the need to keep secret things secret.
    He had been, too, at one time, before bitter experience had lifted the scales from his eyes. Some families were so corrupt it was better to let them die without issue. Some honour did not deserve to be protected. Some secrets were better exposed to the light. It relieved them of their power to taint their surroundings and destroy the lives of those around them.
    And what fresh shame did this girl have, that his family was responsible for? St John, most likely. Carrying another by-blow, to be shuffled quietly into the family deck.
    He frowned. But that couldn’t be right. The letters spoke of old crimes. And when he’d come on the girl and St John together, there had been no sense of conspiracy. She’d seemed a complete stranger to him and to this house. Lost in her surroundings.
    She was not a pretty girl, certainly. But he’d not seen her at her best. Her long dark hair was falling from its pins, bedraggled and wet. The gown she’d worn had never been fashionable and being soaked in the storm had made it even more shapeless. It clung to her tall, bony frame the way that the hair stuck to the sharp contours of her face. Everything about her was hard: the lines of her face and body, the set of her mouth, the look in her eyes.
    He smiled. A woman after his own heart. Maybe they would do well together, after all.

    She looked around in despair. So this was to be her new home. Not this room, she hoped. It was grand enough for a duchess.
    Precisely why she did not belong in it.
    She forced that thought out of her mind.
    ‘This is the life you belong to, not the life you’ve lived so far. The past is an aberration. The future is merely a return to the correct path.’
    All right. She had better take Cici’s words to heart. Repeat them as often as necessary until they became the truth.
    Of course, if this was the life she was meant to have, then dust and cobwebs were an inherent part of her destiny. She’d hoped, when she finally got to enjoy the comforts of a great house, she would not be expected to clean it first. This room had not been aired in years. It would take a stout ladder to get up to the sconces to scrub off the tarnish and the grime, and to the top of the undusted mantelpiece. Hell and damnation upon the head of the man who thought that high ceilings lent majesty to a room.
    She pulled back the dusty curtains on the window to peer into the rain-streaked night. This might be the front of the house, and those lumps below could be the view of a formal garden. No doubt gone to seed like everything else.
    Was her new husband poor, that his estate had faded so? Cici had thought not. ‘Rich enough to waste money on whores,’ she’d said. But then, she’d described the dowager as a spider at the centre of a great web. Miranda hadn’t expected to come and find the web empty.
    Cici would have been overjoyed, she was sure. The weakpart of the plan had always been the co-operation of the son. The dowager could be forced, but how would she gain the cooperation of the son without revealing all? Cici had hoped that one or the other of the two men was so hopelessly under the thumb of his mother as to agree without question when a suitable woman was put before him. But she’d had her doubts. If the sons were in their mother’s control, they’d have been married already.
    To stumble into complete ruin was more good fortune than she could hope for.
    She smothered her rising guilt. The duke had