Page 16 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“I’ll speak plainly, Your Grace. I find it saves everyone the afternoon. You come among us with a very great title and a very great deal of talk trailing along behind it, and a man in my position must weigh one against the other.”

The Earl of Draycott said it over the rim of his glass, mild as milk, on a lawn so green and so groomed it looked painted.

Around them, the garden party murmured through its paces, silks and parasols drifting between the rose beds, a quartet sawing prettily from beneath a striped marquee. Draycott was a broad, pink, comfortable man who had never once been refused anything, and Leo had spent a week maneuvering Magnus into three feet of him.

“Weigh away, Me Lord.” Magnus kept his hands loose at his sides. “I’ve nothin’ to hide.”

He tried. He had promised Leo he would try, and so he reached for the pleasant thing, the common ground a week of coaching had drilled into him.

“I read yer speech on corn duties. The one from the spring. There was sense in it. I’d hoped we might talk about it, one landowner to another.”

“Had you?” Draycott’s smile did not warm by a degree. “How earnest. Though I confess I’m less taken with what you’ve read than with what you’ve done.” He sipped. “They tell me you lifted a man off the floor at White’s a fortnight past. By the throat, over a trifle. And here you are a duke, with a duke’s seat to fill and a duke’s part to play in the ordering of things.” He sipped again. “I only mean to say that a title is a harness. It wants a steady beast in the traces. There are those of us who wonder whether a man can rise above the blood he’s born to, or whether the Highlander in him will always win out. Feral things run to form.”

The lawn tilted a fraction under Magnus. He breathed through it. He thought of Danvers, of Sedgwick, of the small rooms and the keys, of every reason to smile and swallow the thing whole.

Leo stepped smoothly into the pause. “You’ll forgive Draycott, Greythorne. He’s been perfecting that harness metaphor since Tuesday and simply had to get it out before it went off.” He raised his glass. “Personally, I find His Grace remarkably tame. He has not gored a single one of us all week.”

It should have landed. A week ago, it would have. But Draycott’s pink face turned to Leo and cooled, and he looked him up and down, assessing him like a coat gone shabby at the cuff.

“Ah, Lord Rivercourt. Still gilding your betters, I see. Tell me, does the Scot pay you by the introduction or only in the reflected glow? A man of your particular reputation must take his consequences where he can find them these days.” He returned to Magnus, satisfied. “One does wonder at the company a new duke keeps. It says a great deal before he’s said a word himself.”

“It does.” Magnus let his own voice go easy, almost warm, and felt Leo tense beside him at the sound of it. “It says I’d sooner keep company with an honest rake than a man who lectures a room on good blood while his own’s been marryin’ its cousins so long it has forgotten how to make a whole man of a whole spine.” He tilted his head. “But then ye’d ken more about thin stock than me, Me Lord. Ye’ve the look of the last weak calf of a tired line, and I say that with all the tenderness one breeder owes another.”

Leo made a sound as though a grape had gone down the wrong pipe.

Draycott’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. The pink drained from his face and left something mottled behind it, and his eyes went round and then narrow. For a moment, no one said anything at all.

“Champagne.” Leo’s hand was already on Magnus’s elbow, his smile bolted back into place. “We are quite parched, both of us. My Lord, always an education. Do give my regards to your remarkable wife.”

With that, he steered Magnus around and pulled him away before Draycott could open his mouth.

They cut across the lawn at a pace just short of unseemly, past the roses, past a knot of dowagers who watched them go with the frank appetite of women who would have it all over London by supper.

“You cannot do that,” Leo whisper-hissed, still smiling for the sake of the guests. “Magnus, I mean it this time. You cannot answer every insult with a better one. That is not the game. They are permitted to bleed you by inches, and you are permitted to thank them for the privilege. If you will not learn that single rule, you might as well have stayed in your bog and saved us both the crossing.”

“He called me a feral beast to me face, and ye want me to thank him?”

“Yes.” Leo steered them around a marble urn. “That is precisely what I want. That is the entire thing I want. A hundred Draycotts stand between you and the men who know why your father died, and you have just taught this one to hate you for sport. He dines with Sedgwick on Thursdays, Magnus. Thursdays.”

Magnus grunted. The champagne was somewhere ahead, and beyond it more lawn, and beyond that more lords with more mild poison to pour.

“It’s a stupid game,” he said. “Grown men in a garden, smilin’ knives at one another over who’s cousin married whose. I’d rather be honest and hated than one of them.”

“You are managing both admirably.” Leo exhaled and let his shoulders drop an inch. “Stay here. If it is within your power, try not to insult anyone for the length of time it takes me to find us two glasses. Look at the flowers. People do it. It’s said to be soothing.” He went, making for the marquee.

Magnus was left standing alone at the edge of the lawn with nothing to do but obey. He looked at the flowers, but they did nothing for him. So he looked at the party instead, at the slow theater of it, until his gaze caught something. Or rather, someone.

Lady Rosaline was standing apart from all of it.

His little fox had found herself a pocket of quiet beside a flowering hedge, half in its shade, a glass she plainly had no intention of drinking held in one hand. She was watching the party rather than joining it, the way he had been, from the outside, taking its measure and finding it wanting.

A little way off, in the bright middle of everything, stood her brother and her younger sister, ringed by a cluster of the Season’s glossiest young men.

Even at this distance, Magnus could read the whole arrangement of it. Darton, working. The younger girl, Beatrice, penned in the center of it with her chin up and her smile nailed on, enduring. And Rosaline set carefully to the side, still for sale, but no longer the piece worth putting in the window. Ornamental and overlooked at once.

She was not smiling. She was not performing anything. Alone in her scrap of shade, she had let her face go still and thoughtful, entirely her own. It was, Magnus thought, worth more than the gilded rest of the lawn put together.

As though she felt the weight of his stare, her eyes lifted and found his across the crowd.