The duke paid no heed to his rejoinder. “Are you going to allow your mother’s corpse to be sold?”
“I will consider wooing some other heiress,” James said finally. “But I will not marry Daisy.” Theodora Saxby—known to James alone as Daisy—was his dearest friend, his childhood companion. “She deserves better than me, better than anyone from this benighted family.”
There was silence behind him. A terrible, warped silence that . . . James turned. “You didn’t. Even you . . . couldn’t.”
“I thought I would be able to replace it in a matter of weeks,” his father said, the color leaving his cheeks suddenly so that he looked positively used up.
James’s legs felt so weak that he had to lean against the door. “How much of her fortune is gone?”
“Enough.” Ashbrook dropped his eyes, at last showing some sign of shame. “If she marries anyone else, I’ll . . . I’ll face trial. I don’t know if they can put dukes in the dock. The House of Lords, I suppose. But it won’t be pretty.”
“Oh, they can put dukes on trial, all right,” James said heavily. “You embezzled the dowry of a girl entrusted to your care since the time she was a mere infant. Her mother was married to your dearest friend. Saxby asked you on his deathbed to care for his daughter.”
“And I did,” her father replied, but without his usual bluster. “Brought her up as my own.”
“You brought her up as my sister,” James said flatly. He forced himself to cross the room and sit down. “And all the time you were stealing from her.”
“Not all the time,” his father protested. “Just in the last year. Or so. The majority of her fortune is in funds, and I couldn’t touch that. I just . . . I just borrowed from . . . well, I just borrowed some. I’m deuced unlucky, and that’s a fact. I was absolutely sure it wouldn’t come to this.”
“Unlucky?” James repeated, his voice liquid with disgust.
“Now the girl is getting a proposal or two, I don’t have the time to make it up. You’ve got to take her. It’s not just that the estate and this town house will have to go; after the scandal, the name won’t be worth anything, either. Even if I pay off what I borrowed from her by selling the estate, the whole wouldn’t cover my debts.”
James didn’t reply. The only words going through his head were flatly blasphemous.
“It was easier when your mother was alive,” the duke said, after a minute or two. “She helped, you know. She had a level head on her shoulders.”
James couldn’t bring himself to answer that, either. His mother had died nine years earlier, so in under a decade his father had managed to impoverish an estate stretching from Scotland to Staffordshire to London. And he had embezzled Daisy’s fortune.
“You’ll make her love you,” his father said encouragingly, dropping into a chair opposite James. “She already adores you; she always has. We’ve been lucky so far in that poor Theodora is as ugly as a stick. The only men who’ve asked for her hand have been such obvious fortune hunters that her mother wouldn’t even consider them. But that’ll change as the season wears on. She’s a taking little piece, once you get to know her.”
James ground his teeth. “She will never love me in that way. She thinks of me as her brother, as her friend. And she has no resemblance whatsoever to a stick.”
“Don’t be a fool. You’ve got my profile.” A glimmer of vanity underscored his words. “Your mother always said that I was the most handsome man of my generation.”
James bit back a remark that would do nothing to help the situation. He was experiencing an overwhelming wave of nausea. “We could tell Daisy what happened. What you did. She’ll understand.”
His father snorted. “Do you think her mother will understand? My old friend Saxby didn’t know what he was getting into when he married that woman. She’s a termagant, a positive tartar.”
In the seventeen years since Mrs. Saxby and her infant daughter had joined the duke’s household, she and Ashbrook had managed to maintain sufficiently cordial relations—primarily because His Grace had never thrown anything in the widow’s direction. But James knew instantly that his father was right. If Daisy’s mother got even a hint that her daughter’s guardian had misappropriated her inheritance, a fleet of solicitors would be battering on the town house door before evening fell. Bile drove James’s stomach into his throat at the thought.
His father, on the other hand, was cheering up. He had the sort of mind that flitted from one subject to another; his rages were ferocious but short-lived. “A few posies, maybe a poem, and Theodora will fall into your hand as sweetly as a ripe plum. After all, it’s not as if the girl gets much flattery. Tell her she’s beautiful, and she’ll be at your feet.”
“I cannot do that,” James stated, not even bothering to imagine himself saying such a thing. It wasn’t a matter of not wishing to spout such inanities to Daisy herself; he loathed situations where he found himself fumbling with language and stumbling around the ballroom. The season was three weeks old, but he hadn’t attended a single ball.
His father misinterpreted his refusal. “Of course, you’ll have to lie about it, but that’s the kind of lie a gentleman can’t avoid. She may not be the prettiest girl on the market—and certainly not as delectable as that opera dancer I saw you with the other night—but it wouldn’t get you anywhere to point out the truth.” He actually gave a little chuckle at the thought.
James heard him only dimly; he was concentrating on not throwing up as he tried to think through the dilemma before him.
The duke continued, amusing himself by laying out the distinction between mistresses and wives. “In compensation, you can keep a mistress who’s twice as beautiful as your wife. It’ll provide an interesting contrast.”
It occurred to James, not for the first time, that there was no human being in the world he loathed as much as his father. “If I marry Daisy, I will not take a mistress,” he said, still thinking frantically, trying to come up with a way out. “I would never do that to her.”
“Well, I expect you’ll change your mind about that after a few years of marriage, but to each his own.” The duke’s voice was as strong and cheerful as ever. “Well? Not much to think about, is there? It’s bad luck and all that rot, but I can’t see that either of us has much choice about it. The good thing is that a man can always perform in the bedroom, even if he doesn’t want to.”
The only thing James wanted at that moment was to get out of the room, away from his disgusting excuse for a parent. But he had lost the battle, and he forced himself to lay out the rules for surrender. “I will only do this on one condition.” His voice sounded unfamiliar to his own ears, as if a stranger spoke the words.
“Anything, my boy, anything! I know I’m asking for a sacrifice. As I said, we can admit amongst ourselves that little Theodora is not the beauty of the bunch.”
“The day I marry her, you sign the entire estate over to me—the Staffordshire house and its lands, this town house, the island in Scotland.”