A Deal with the Duke Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  A Note from Patty Bryant

  Other Romances To Love

  A Deal with the Duke

  Patty Bryant

  CHAPTER ONE

  London, 1816

  England was nothing like Savitri Booth had expected.

  To be fair, she hadn’t seen very much of it yet. Perhaps it would improve – or, based on some of the worse rumors she’d heard, decline – once she had given it more time and had a greater acquaintance with its people. Savitri might have been here for nearly a month, but she could still count the places she’d actually seen on one hand.

  The first such place, the one where she’d spent most of her time in England so far, was the country house belonging to the Ware family. Savitri had worked for Lord Bernard Ware and Lady Louisa Ware for several years as a governess for their daughters Penelope and Lucy, but that had been back home in India. When she had agreed to accompany the family on their return to England, she had expected more. Oh, the house was grand enough, and certainly had more rooms than there was any need of. The grounds were vast and well-maintained – at least, the grounds close enough to be considered suitable for delicately bred young ladies like her charges to walk in were. But it simply wasn’t very different from a grand house in Bengal.

  Savitri had been given a bedroom of her own, which she knew was quite a privilege, and its window overlooked the estate’s more distant grounds. Sometimes, very early in the morning or late at night when she had a moment to herself, she gazed wonderingly at a dense forest to the west, the area beneath the trees dark and thickly overgrown. She knew that was where the differences lived: trees she couldn’t name, animals she’d never heard of, flowers she’d memorized poetry about but had never actually seen. She longed to slip away and explore, but there had been no opportunity before the entire family packed their bags and moved once more.

  This departure had at least led to Savitri’s introduction to three new English places – two inns and one carriage. They might not have been grand, but she suspected they would have made excellent sites to discover more about England. Unfortunately she’d hardly learned a thing, kept busy running to and fro after her charges who were overexcited from the travel.

  Yesterday she’d added place number five to her list: a London townhouse, also owned by the Wares. London was even more exciting than a real English forest, but she’d been kept indoors working, unable to rush out and throw herself into this new world.

  Five fingers and five places. Savitri sighed and reminded herself, once again, to be patient. She had every reason to believe that she would be spending the rest of her life in England; she didn’t need to rush to explore it.

  “But why can’t I go to the party?” Lucy, the younger of the two Ware girls, shouted, disrupting Savitri’s thoughts.

  Savitri repeated herself with the calm tolerance she had learned after years of teaching children: “Because it is a party for adults, and you, my dear, are not yet out. It would be inappropriate for a girl still in the schoolroom to attend such an event.”

  “But it’s a party for my papa and my mama. I should be there too!’

  Penelope, the oldest Ware child, rolled her eyes. “Stop whining, Lucy. This is why no one wants you at their parties.”

  Lucy’s mouth dropped open. She didn’t immediately respond, caught up in choice between bursting into tears or shouting at her sister.

  Savitri intervened before she could do either. “We’ll have our own party right here. The cook has promised to send us up the same food being served to the guests – won’t that be nice? He’s baking cake for dessert, you know. I’ve never eaten cake made by a real Frenchman.”

  Lucy subsided, but still looked sullen. “It’s not the same.”

  “Of course it’s not the same,” Penelope said imperiously. She had dressed in her best gown, though she would’t be attending the grand event being held downstairs any more than her younger sister. Her blonde curls were arranged artfully – well, they were actually quite messy and already falling apart in the back, but Savitri could tell that the disarray was meant to be artful, even if Penelope had clearly attempted the style without the assistance of her usual maid – and she wore a pearl necklace, the only piece of real jewelry that she owned. The rest of her pieces were ribbons and glass beads, since Lady Louisa firmly insisted that gems were not to be worn by little girls.

  Not being allowed to attend the ball clearly bothered her just as much as it bothered Lucy, although Penelope was better at hiding her displeasure. And in truth, Savitri agreed with the girls; it seemed cruel to hold a homecoming ball that half the home-comers weren’t invited to.

  She had mentioned the matter to their mother that morning while both girls were in another room working on their embroidery. It had been the only time she’d managed to catch Lady Louisa alone since the ball had been announced. Life in a London townhouse seemed to be a never-ending bustle of visiting and planning and shopping and cleaning, at least from what Savitri had witnessed so far.

  “Couldn’t the girls come to the ball, perhaps only for a few minutes?” she had asked. “It would mean so much to them. They’re sorely disappointed at being excluded.”

  Lady Louisa had set down the letter she was reading, sighed, and turned to Savitri. “I know they are. My poor little chicks. If it was my ball, you may be certain that I would allow them to come, and pshaw!” – she waved a hand – “to social convention. Their happiness is much more important. But despite what it may say on the invitations, I am not actually the hostess. And my brother will not hear of having two schoolgirls at his ball.”

  Her brother.

  The man in question was actually her brother-in-law – Alexander Ware, the Duke of Clermont. Everything Savitri had heard about him suggested that he was indeed a strict and imposing man, just the sort to forbid his nieces from the homecoming ball, but Savitri suspected Lady Louisa was using him as an excuse to get her own way. She’d never allowed her daughters to attend any balls in Calcutta either. In fact, she’d never been particularly concerned with her daughters’ well-being in any regard. She seemed to assume that someone or other would take care of them for her and, Savitri was forced to admit, she seemed to be right. Penelope and Lucy were certainly better behaved than some students she’d taught.

  But flighty and shallow as she might be, once Lady Louisa made up her mind there was no changing it. She hated any sort of trouble. Savitri had simply curtsied politely and let the matter rest. Which meant she was now faced with spending the entire evening alone with two angry, jealous girls. Even the best-behaved child would be a trial under the circumstances.

  “It was your uncle’s decision,” Savitri said, finding that the Duke of Clermont made a useful scapegoat for her as well. “And we all owe him gratitude, not resentment.”

  Penelope tossed her head in imitation of her mother and turned away. “I don’t know why. No one asked him to bring us here.”

  “It’s because of George,” Lucy said sullenly. She deliberately put her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her fists. “Everyone likes him better than us.”

  “He’s not attending the ball either,” Savitri joked, but both girls directed a flat, unamused look her way.

  George was their baby brother, a chubby, re
d-cheeked infant with a tendency to drool on himself. More importantly, he was the current heir to the Duchy of Clermont. No one had said so directly, but Savitri suspected he was the real reason the Wares – and therefore her – were in England.

  She had been hired to teach Penelope and Lucy by Lord Bernard Ware, the duke’s younger brother. Back then there had been no baby George, and Savitri had thought this job no more or less important than any of the many other governessing jobs she’d held before. Bernard was kind, the sort of man who never missed a meal and always had time to play with children. That made him a good employer, and she was glad to teach his two daughters – both of them born in Calcutta just like Savitri, though unlike her they were English through and through.

  Unfortunately Lord Bernard’s good humor and generosity had not helped him at business. Despite spending most of his adult life in India, he had failed to accumulate the riches of the other British colonists and had ended his would-be merchant career by returning to England with less money than he’d set out with.

  George had been born around the same time that Bernard’s latest business venture had failed. The family was in such desperate financial straits that Savitri worried she might be let go, and she’d begun to keep her eye out for other potential positions. Then the letter from the duke arrived. Savitri had never met the man, but she could say one thing of him: he didn’t let his family suffer. He’d written with an offer to provide them a home in England and to take care of all their needs. It was a generous offer but then, since the duke had never married, George was destined to be the next duke. His uncle had good reason to want to keep him close.

  The duke had been so generous he’d allowed the Wares to maintain their large retinue of servants, and had even paid for the family’s favorites to come to England as well. Savitri was one of them.

  It had been a difficult decision, the most difficult of her life. On the one hand, if she went with the Wares to England, she doubted that she would ever return to her homeland. Her salary was large for a governess, but it would be nearly impossible to save the money to pay for a return passage.

  To leave her home! To never again see the sights imprinted on her heart: the broad brown span of the Hooghly River, the Cathedral of the Most Holy Rosary she had attended every Sunday with its towering twin cupolas, the bright green of the cheerful parakeets in their flocks overhead. She would never taste fresh fish steamed in mustard again, or sweet rasgulla, or jalebi bought sneakily from the street vendors when her mother wasn’t watching. She would never more hear Bengali shouted in the street, Persian murmured in offices, and Sanskrit chanted in the temples.

  Most devastating of all, if Savitri left India she would likely never see her mother again. Her father had died when she was no older than George, leaving her only the Booth family name and skin paler than was typical for a Bengali woman. Savitri barely remembered him. It was her mother who had raised her, who had protected her from hateful comments directed at their mixed-race community, and who had worked to provide Savitri with the education that allowed her to become a governess. To lose her mother forever would be like leaving behind the best part of herself.

  And yet she was tempted. Savitri had heard about England all of her life – its people, its art, its palaces and rolling hills and gray skies. She had read about it in books. She had seen paintings of famous sites in the parlors of her employers and their friends. She had even taught its history and geography to her students, though she had felt awkward lecturing about a country she’d never visited.

  The information she’d gotten out of books was no longer enough; what the Wares offered was the opportunity to experience it for herself. Savitri had always been curious. As a child, she’d tormented her mother with endless questions when she wasn’t escaping to peer around every corner and open every closed door. When she had learned to read, it was like discovering a whole new world: here were the answers to her questions, the knowledge she had longed for.

  Savitri quickly learned that the horizons of scholarship were even broader than they had first seemed. Every answer she found only led to new questions. She had pushed ever onwards, learning as much as she could about science, history, languages, art, philosophy – there was no subject that she didn’t explore. Her dearest love was mathematics; she admired the precision of the numbers and the laws they followed, the way equations were always the same and always true no matter who worked them or where they had studied. Mathematics was like a glittering, detailed sphere too high for mere human matters to reach.

  But eventually Savitri hit a limit. It was no longer enough for her to read. She wanted to do. And there was very little that was appropriate for a young Anglo-Indian woman to do, particularly once she was no longer a child. Savitri’s world, which had once seemed so wide, narrowed down to a mere two neighborhoods: her own, where she and other families of mixed-race lived, and that of her employers, the white British of the East India Company. She still had her books, of course, but ink on a page now seemed pale and insubstantial. She wanted flesh and blood, to see and touch and taste for herself.

  England... England might be more. And the Ware family might be her one chance to see it.

  Her mother had known what Savitri’s decision would be before Savitri had. “Daughter,” she had said, holding Savitri’s face in her hands. Her English wasn’t as fluent as Savitri’s and she preferred to speak Bengali when they were together. The familiar sounds of that language would always mean family and love and home to Savitri. “Daughter, you must follow your heart, no matter where it takes you. If you did not go, I know that you would always wonder what might have happened. You are too curious for your own good,” she had added with a wry smile, “so how could I stop you?” Then she had kissed Savitri’s forehead, blessed her, and told her to go.

  The memory came back to Savitri in a rush and she shook her head like it was something she could physically dispel, like she’d walked face-first into a cobweb rather than merely a bitter reminiscence. She opened her eyes and looked around her: the same two girls she’d taught in Calcutta. A small schoolroom just like any she’d known in her years as a governess, small and filled with slightly shabby furniture banished from the more elegant rooms downstairs. This wasn’t what she’d left her home for. Regret filled her mouth like ashes, and she felt like the girls, small and unfairly exiled from the world outside their door.

  “Don’t sulk,” she said, as much to herself as to the girls. “We have to make the best of the circumstances we’re given.”

  Penelope groaned. “Ugh. Now you sound like our old governess. You’re usually much more fun than her, Miss Booth.”

  “Thank you. I think. And look, it’s not all doom and gloom. You do get to go downstairs and formally greet the duke.”

  “He’s just our uncle. It won’t be exciting if no one new is there.” Lucy let her hands fall flat in front of her and slumped down face-first onto the table, pretending to die from the awfulness of it all.

  “And mother said we had to be bed before any of the guests arrived!” Penelope sounded as distraught as her sister, though she managed to keep somewhat better control of her limbs. “I only agreed to move here from India because she promised to she’d bring me out and take me to balls and parties and dances at Almack’s.”

  Savitri chose not to point out the inherent ridiculousness of a sixteen-year-old agreeing to move anywhere. “Next year, she said. You’re not old enough yet.”

  Penelope huffed impatiently.

  “Well, I’m excited to meet the duke, even if neither of you are.” Savitri forced her voice into cheerfulness, though the part of her that refused to believe she was actually thirty-one wanted to slump and moan like the girls.

  “You’ve already met him,” Penelope said peevishly.

  “Not really. I caught sight of him across the courtyard when we first arrived, but I didn’t speak to him. Of course, I might not tonight either. A duke has no reason to speak to the governess of h
is two young nieces.”

  Penelope and Lucy were momentarily silenced by that. They both had a sense of inherent fairness that made them upset to see unjust or hurtful treatment, a trait which seemed to have skipped the rest of their family.

  Lucy reached across the table to pat Savitri’s hand. “Don’t worry. He’s just another boring old man. You wouldn’t like talking to him anyway.”

  The sympathy didn’t last long. The girls’ focus soon turned back to themselves and they spent the rest of the time until the maid came to fetch them complaining about the ball, their new home, the aftereffects of their recent travel, and the weather – England in October was far chillier and darker than any of them were used to. As they made their way down the stairs to the formal drawing room where their uncle and parents awaited them, Savitri found her heart unexpectedly pounding. She had never met a duke before, much less one who had so much control over her destiny. He had already changed the entire course of her life; what might he do next?

  Trying to distract herself, she stopped on the staircase just outside the door and bent over Lucy, tugging her dress straight. “Don’t slouch,” she whispered, then put a hand on her shoulder and gently pushed the sisters into standing side by side. “You want to look good for your uncle.”

  So do I, she thought but quickly swallowed that idea back down. A governess was only a servant, not someone a duke would care about.

  She walked behind the young sisters as they entered the drawing room, her hands folded in front of her waist and her head bowed. Despite the demure position, Savitri could still see out of the corner of her eyes, and she took full advantage. The room was elaborately decorated, full of stylish chairs upholstered in a striped cloth that matched the wallpaper. A fire burned on the hearth, bright enough to light even the most distant corners and warming the air with a rich, woody scent. Lord and Lady Ware sat together on an elegant chaise, Bernard dressed in the formal black coat and tan breeches of gentleman, his wife in a gauzy white dress that made her look years younger than she was.