Chapter Twenty-One
“Receipts, bills, and more boring receipts!” Giles tossed the papers back into their labeled box and pushed it to one side beside him on the ballroom floor with its predecessor before he reached for another biscuit from the tea tray Dalton had only just topped up. As they had finished searching the duke’s house and the place gave him the shivers, Giles had had the entire contents of his sire’s study transported to his house yesterday instead. It was certainly warmer here in Tavistock Square, as well as less oppressive. It also made smuggling Diana in and out easier because her family did not live on the doorstep.
“This is torture. Futile torture. And we are going to need more biscuits.”
“Will you stop distracting me while I am trying to concentrate.” Her eyes never rose from the book she was studying.
“Well, it is torture. We’ve gone back thirty-one years and there’s nothing out of the ordinary.” They had spent the best part of ten hours hunting through the duke’s papers and found nothing else of any significance since the enamel, but while he was tearing his hair out at their lack of progress, Diana remained as calm as a swan.
“I am almost done with my ledger, too. Fetch me 1794, would you? I can at least make a start on that before I have to leave.”
“I wasn’t alive in 1794. I was barely alive in 1795 so I wouldn’t bother.”
She glanced up from the ledger only long enough to give him a withering look. “A seed sprouts roots before shoots, Giles.”
“And now you are talking in riddles, Diana.”
“Oh for pity’s sake!” She finally sat up from her cross-legged puddle of petticoats and folded her arms, giving him her full attention. “Stop being so shortsighted. Do you think you just appeared out of thin air thirty-one years ago? Babies take nine months to gestate and then there is the time before, which must be factored into our investigation.”
“Before what?”
“Before your conception, idiot!”
“I really do not want to have to contemplate my conception.” Giles pulled a face at the unsavory image of the duke huffing and puffing that skittered across his mind. “Please don’t make me. I am still not over the trauma of Lady Sewell and her fake Russian count.”
“I wasn’t so much referring to that…” She flapped her hand as the beguiling hint of a blush stained her cheeks. “More the courting period that came before it.”
“Men don’t tend to court harlots, Diana. It’s more a spur-of-the-moment financial transaction than a study in wooing.”
“The woman in the watch doesn’t look like a harlot.”
It was the first time either of them had vocalized his growing suspicion. “You think she is my mother?”
“I think she might be.” Diana waved a finger around her ownface. “There is something about her eyes and her expression that reminds me of you. An irreverence…”
“As if she sees everything as one big joke.”
She winced as if she had hurt his feelings. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t—but the duke did. During our final conversation when I swore blind he was on the cusp of comparing me to my mother.” Giles retrieved the watch from his waistcoat, opened it, and stared again at the woman in the enamel. “You are right… she doesn’t look like a harlot.” But she looked like someone he understood.
“If I am right, Giles, then it also stands to reason that whatever she and your father shared was more than a spur-of-the-moment financial transaction. She meant something to him. Why else would he have carried her around on his person till the day he died?”
“It is hard to contemplate the duke with a soft side. He was always… so… terse and ducal.”
“How old was he when he inherited?”
“Much younger than me. Five and twenty? Give or take a year. But he had been trained for it from birth by my grandfather, so he was likely much better prepared for the responsibility. Back in old George the Dueler’s day, the Sinclairs stayed at Harpenden Hall and Gerald accompanied him everywhere, learning at his knee, whereas Gerald, my crotchety old sire, did his level best to avoid the place while I was growing up in it and much preferred to stay in London. I had to train myself.”
“I wonder why?” Her gaze flicked to the open watch still in his hands. “Olivia said he was wedded to Harpenden in his youth. Barely left the place. Yet after you were born, we have proof heavoided it at all costs. Painful memories perhaps, of a love lost or a love denied?”
Giles scoffed at that fanciful nonsense. “The duke’s heart only pumped blood, Diana. It wasn’t capable of love. But if Gervais was correct, I am not sure the duke spent all those years at Harpenden.” He mimicked his uncle’s menacing tones. “He cut himself off for a whole winter in outraged rebellion but still married the bride the old man had picked out in the end despite his short-lived stint in Wales.”
“Perhaps that stint in Wales coincided with… um…” Diana blushed again as she avoided his gaze.
“My parents getting passionate? Sadly, I doubt it, as for the duke to have cut himself off from his father, his father would have needed to be alive, and he died when sour old Gerald was in his middle twenties. He was the same age as me when he brought me home—one and thirty—and George the Dueler had been dead for years by then. Gervais also said it occurred before he married the duchess, so I fear the short-lived stint in Wales is a red herring. Another frustrating, pointless dead end.”
Her nose wrinkled in the most charming way. “Still, it is worth investigating.”
