The Taming of the Duke
Page 16

"She'll never take you while you're drinking," Gabe said.
Rafe squinted at him. "What the devil are you talking about?"
"Lady Maitland. Imogen, if you prefer."
Rafe gave a short laugh. "She doesn't want me, you fool. She wants you. Couldn't you tell from the way she looked at you?"
"She looked at me with some desire," Gabe said with his usual scholarly objectivity.
Rafe considered fratricide.
"But she looks at you with rage, and I judge that the stronger emotion."
"You're a fool. She'd never take me."
"Why?"
"Worthless," Rafe said shortly. "If I were Peter, it might be different. You met Peter. You must have noticed what a great fellow he was. He kept the estate going, you know. Even when he was a mere boy, he negotiated between my parents. When they were fighting, which was often, he was the only one who could speak to both of them. He was… rather wonderful."
"Ah."
"Naturally, Peter never drank to excess."
"It must have been difficult to follow in his footsteps," Gabe said.
Rafe laughed shortly. "I think my father put it best. He said I'd make a dog's breakfast of the business, and he was right. I made the same of this guardianship." His fingers clenched on his glass. "Though that's less my fault. What the devil was Brydone doing, leaving his daughters in the care of a person he'd met only once? If he hadn't taken a ride on a half-broken stallion, all four of the Essexes would still be safely living in Scotland."
And if that were the case, he added silently to himself, Imogen would be sharpening her tongue on some poor Scotsman rather than flaying him as her daily pastime.
One had to suppose that if she were looking at Gabe with desire, she'd be interested in trying out his rod soon. Or the performance thereof.
Gabe had finished his apple. "I expect Brydone thought to live forever. It's a common human condition."
Rafe felt the opposite himself, but the subject didn't interest him, so he started brooding over Imogen again.
Nothing along the lines of an ethical argument would stop her. She and Mayne had probably spent every free moment on the trip to Scotland in the bedchamber. Of course Mayne had lied to him when he swore that he was staying out of Imogen's bed. No sane man would do that.
What's more, Gabe was eminently sane. A touch of ice slid down his neck. Gabe would presumably see no reason not to avail himself of Imogen's eminently available charms.
"She's not as composed as she appears," he said abruptly. "She truly loved Maitland, you know. They weren't married long enough for disillusionment to set in."
"What sort of man was he?" Gabe said, beginning to peel another apple.
"A bounder. Passionate about his horseflesh and little else. A man for a wager. He lost his life when he rode a horse that his jockey had refused to mount. Thought he could win the race. Instead he smashed his head into a post before his wife's very eyes."
"Poor Lady Maitland."
"She chose him," Rafe said, knowing his voice was just a growl. "She came into this house already in love with that excuse for a man. She sat at this table and stared at him as if he were the Christ Child come straight from heaven. And that was Maitland she was staring at!"
He raised his head and stared unbelievingly at Gabe. "You wouldn't countenance it if you'd met him. A finer specimen of village idiot was hardly to be found throughout England. And he was engaged at the time. But Imogen didn't give a fig. She simply marched over to his house—well, rode, actually—and before we knew it, she'd eloped with the man."
"A decisive young woman," Gabe said, placing the apple before him.
Rafe blinked at it.
"Go on, I peeled it for you."
Their eyes met, and for a moment Rafe felt an embarrassing wave of emotion. "Thanks." And then: "Imogen flung herself from her horse on purpose, you see, and injured her ankle. That got her into Maitland's house, and of course the man had no chance, once she had him in close quarters."
Gabe didn't seem to take in the veiled warning Rafe was giving him. "And was Maitland relieved to be rid of his fiancee, or otherwise?"
"Didn't know what hit him," Rafe said, eating a piece of apple. He rarely ate after the first course, preferring not to complicate the taste of whiskey with that of food. But the apple tasted clean and good.
"Was it a happy marriage?"
"Can't have been," Rafe said. "She's—well, you've met Imogen. And he was a buffoon. Addicted to the track, most happy when he was mounting a horse, not a woman. One look at him and anyone could tell that he thought of his rod with about as much delicacy as a pump handle. Wouldn't have been capable of giving a woman pleasure."
Gabe placed the silver knife with which he had peeled the apple precisely in the middle of his plate. "If you want to stop drinking," he said, "I believe the best way to do so is simply to give it up altogether."
Rafe managed a grunt.
"I have heard that attempts to cut down one's consumption are doomed to failure."
"Oh, I don't know," Rafe said, responding to a ner-vous spasm at the thought. "I'm sure I could just reduce my consumption to a more suitable level."
"It's certainly worth a try," Gabe said.
It must be something about a scholar's exactitude. Rafe could tell without even thinking twice that his brother was correct about the inadvisability of cutting down as opposed to giving up spirits altogether. Gabriel Spenser was likely very often correct in his judgments.
"How did you get to be a professor, given as you're a by-blow of my father's?" he asked suddenly.
His brother had a sweet, crooked smile. "I'm quite good at what I do."
"I know that. I suppose you took a tripos ia mathematics first?"
"Indeed. For a time I wasn't sure whether I would continue in mathematics, but I found the lure of ancient history to be strong."
"I don't care if you were bloody Peter and Paul come back to earth in one body," Rafe said. "Everything I know about Oxford—and I assume that Cambridge is much the same—implies that ability can only take one so far."
Gabe's crooked smile had a great deal of candor in it. Rafe found himself glad that Imogen had left the room. Who could resist a smile like that?
"Your father helped," Gabe said.
"Our father," Rafe corrected him. "I'm getting sick of correcting you on that point. What the hell did Hol-brook do?" And found himself waiting with genuine curiosity. To the best of his knowledge, his father had never shown the slightest interest in how Rafe sent himself to the devil. He certainly would not have put himself out, had Rafe made a choice of career that required parental support.
"He endowed the college," Gabe said.
"What?"
"He gave Emmanuel College a sum of money." And then, responding to Rafe's lifted eyebrow, "something in the neighborhood of forty thousand pounds. The money undoubtedly came from your estate," he said, his eyes troubled. "I have long felt the guilt of having taken that money from you and yours."