The Odious Duke Read online

  Her voice was so forlorn that the Duke smiled.

  “I am sure there are a great many people who will console you in my absence. But I am indeed very deeply apologetic that you should have come to London at such an inopportune moment. I have made my plans, Zazeli, and I cannot unmake them at a moment’s notice.”

  “Not even for me?”

  The Duke’s eyes were on her lips.

  “Not even for you!”

  “Mon Dieu, but you are cruel! So cruel, so hard-hearted! It is that icy control of yours that I have tried so hard to break. Once I thought I had succeeded, but now once more it possesses you. Where is the fire, the burning fire, that we kindled between us and which burst into flame at least for a little while in Paris?”

  Zazeli now came nearer to the Duke so that he was aware of the tantalising and exotic scent she used. It was a fragrance made especially for her and those who had once been Zazeli’s lovers never forgot the way that it lingered in her hair, in the smooth whiteness of her skin and even in the touch of her lips.

  She stood in front of the Duke, her body touching his knees, her face almost level with his. Very slowly she reached out her arms, rounded and soft, towards his neck.

  “Ou est le feu?” she whispered. “Can it really have gone out – so that I can no longer – kindle it again?”

  Her lips touched his at the last word and now her arms entwined round his neck held him captive. There was something almost snake-like in the way her body moved sinuously against him.

  With experienced hands the Duke pulled the green négligée from Zazeli’s white shoulders and let it slither away to the floor. Then, picking her up in his arms, he carried her across the room to the draped bed in the corner.

  *

  Two hours later the Duke was tooling his horses up Park Lane past Tyburn and out towards the North. There was still a faint fragrance of Zazeli on his hands and on his clothes.

  He was well aware that his plans had gone astray, but he knew that he could make up most of the time lost once they reached the open road.

  The chestnuts he was driving were a team that he had purchased the previous year and which had cost him over two thousand guineas.

  There had been hot competition for them amongst the Corinthians, but the Duke was determined to be their owner and had continued to bid long after most of his friends had said the price was beyond their pockets.

  Now the Duke congratulated himself on not having been deterred by their costliness.

  The horses, as if they knew their Master was in a hurry, responded magnificently to his touch on the ribbons and the phaeton sped along in the sunshine.

  The Duke overtook every vehicle on the Great North Road in a way that made his groom exclaim,

  “Indeed, Your Grace drives to an inch! There’s no one who could gainsay that!”

  “Don’t let me frighten you, Fowler,” the Duke said with a smile.

  “You won’t do that, Your Grace. But there’s many on the roads today that aren’t fit to be behind anything but a donkey and that be true!”

  It was a remark that was to prove itself regrettably true when the Duke reached the outskirts of Baldock in the County of Hertfordshire.

  Here on a hill running down into the town, they could now see long before they reached it that an accident had taken place.

  But, when they were a hundred yards from it, Fowler exclaimed,

  “’Tis Your Grace’s travelling carriage!”

  “I can see that,” the Duke muttered sharply.

  It was indeed his carriage pulled up on the left-hand side of the road, the footmen at the horses’ heads, while the coachman in his tiered riding cape was now having a noisy altercation with a burly red-faced man, who clearly had been the driver of the stagecoach that had come to rest in the opposite ditch.

  The stagecoach, it was quite obvious to the Duke at first glance, had taken the corner much too sharply and then, encountering the travelling carriage, had been unable to pull left in time to prevent a collision.

  Slow-brained from an over-indulgence in strong ale at the last stop, the coachman had clearly snatched at the reins. The horses had swerved desperately but the heavy overloaded vehicle had just touched the wheel of the carriage before being precipitated over the bank into the ditch.

  However, the outside passengers had been tumbled into the road and those inside were threatened by suffocation as they fell screaming on top of each other.

  The highway was now littered with baggage, fruit and food scattered from baskets, the guard’s blunderbuss, the coachman’s hat, trunks that had burst open and disgorged their contents and a number of passengers were standing disconsolately amongst the debris.

  Women were being assisted from inside the coach, weeping more with fright than from any vital injury.

  The Duke drew his phaeton to a standstill, handed the reins over to Fowler and stepped into the road.

  The noise of the altercation between his coachman and the driver of the stagecoach was now almost deafening.

  The Duke, striding up to the irate coachman, ordered him tersely,

  “Go to your horses’ heads, you fool!”

  The man after a startled look at the tall commanding figure speaking to him, instinctively obeyed the voice of authority and at once ceased his blasphemous abuse and turned to do what he was told.

  In what seemed a remarkably short space of time, the Duke replaced chaos with order.

  The stagecoach horses were freed from the traces and dragged onto the road, the coach was towed out of the ditch and by extraordinary good fortune was found to be undamaged.

  The Duke’s manner of speaking to the passengers calmed their fears and prevented them from refusing to continue their journey, as most if not all of them, had been determined to do after the accident happened.

  With the help of the Duke’s staff, luggage was once more packed on top of the coach, the passengers restored to their seats and their food collected from the roadway.

  Almost before the travellers could realise what had happened, the coachman had whipped in his team and the coach went slowly up the hill.

  The Duke then turned to his own servants.

  “He were drunk, Your Grace,” the coachman said defensively.

  “He is sober enough now,” the Duke replied.

  He inspected his horses, which seemed in good shape, then bent to look at the wheel of his carriage. It was buckled, there was no doubt about that. It was not that badly damaged, but then it would have to be straightened by a wheelwright.

  “How is it you have taken so long to get here?” the Duke enquired.

  “It were young George, Your Grace,” the Head Coachman replied with the air of a martyr.

  “The lad felt sick and we had to stop twice on that account. I’ve now taken him up in the front beside me and put James at the back. But I told Mr. Graystone not to send him. There be motion with that new springin’ on the carriage, Your Grace, and George has always been queasy about the stomach.”

  “A real nuisance!” the Duke observed, making a mental note that in future footmen with queasy stomachs were not to leave Selchester House.

  “A nuisance, indeed, Your Grace. No doubt the baggage chaise has been in Baldock for over an hour by now,” the Head Coachman remarked through gritted teeth.

  The Duke, however, was not listening.

  “Drive on slowly,” he said. “We are meeting at The George and Dragon, is that not right?”

  “The George and Dragon, Your Grace.”

  “Then we will all go there,” the Duke said, “and find someone to repair the wheel immediately. Pay double what they ask if necessary. I do not wish to stay here any longer than I must.”

  “Very good, Your Grace.”

  The Duke found The George and Dragon passably comfortable and there was in its cellar a bottle of claret that he generously declared to be at least drinkable.

  It was annoying, His Grace thought, that he must spend the rest of the day
in sleepy Baldock, but he had no intention of arriving at Lord Upminster’s house except in the manner that would be expected of him.

  It would have been thought shabby behaviour for any gentleman in his position to call on another Nobleman, who was in fact the merest acquaintance without a certain amount of pomp and ceremony.

  To have driven up in his phaeton would have seemed almost an insult, apart from the fact that the Duke had no intention of proclaiming the fact that his coachman had been involved in an accident.

  However much the fault lay with the other party concerned, one was always inclined to think that, just as it takes two to make a quarrel, it also takes two coaches to cause a collision.

  ‘No,’ His Grace decided, ‘the wheel must be mended and while it is done I shall have to kick my heels in Baldock.’

  As it so happened, the Duke was well amused. He learnt from the landlord of the inn that there was a cockfight in process and, asking for his phaeton, he drove outside the town to a farm where he discovered quite a company of farmers, townsmen and cock-fighting fanciers.

  When he returned to the inn, the dinner that the landlord provided was at least edible even though His Grace’s chef at Selchester House would have declared it not fit even for the scullions.

  When the Duke was embarking on a third glass of port, Mr. Carter, looking rather more white-faced and harassed than usual, entered the room and craved his attention.

  “Well, Carter, what news?” the Duke enquired.

  “The wheel should be finished late this evening, Your Grace,” Mr. Carter replied with a composure he was far from feeling. “I had thought perhaps Your Grace would wish to continue your journey as far as Eaton Socon. But it is a dark night and we might encounter further mishap.”

  “I have no intention of moving at night as if we were highwaymen or sneak-thieves,” the Duke replied. “I can obtain a bed in this place, I suppose?”

  “Yes, indeed, Your Grace, I have already booked it for you,” Mr. Carter replied.

  “In which case see that the coachmen and grooms are provided with reasonable comfort. I have no wish for them to sleep in a hayloft!”

  “No, Your Grace, and may I add that Your Grace’s consideration in this matter is greatly appreciated?”

  “We will leave at nine-thirty tomorrow morning,” the Duke said.

  His Grace, however, was over-optimistic. The following morning when he descended for breakfast it was to find an irate farmer demanding to see him.

  From his incomprehensible utterances the Duke found that there had been a crate of live hens on the stagecoach belonging to the farmer. In the flurry of repacking the vehicle, these had been forgotten and were not discovered on the roadside until late in the evening.

  The farmer, who lived some distance from Baldock, had not been apprised of the mishap until he had come to market early that morning and hearing that the Duke’s chaise had been involved he had come to The George and Dragon filled with a sense of grievance.

  He was extremely voluble about having lost a good sale for the hens as Smithfield Market, where his wife, who was a passenger in the coach, was taking them at dawn.

  “Can they not leave today?” the Duke asked when the farmer paused for breath, having recited his grievances at the top of his voice with such violence that it seemed as if he might have a seizure at any moment.

  By this time the Duke was bored.

  “Pay the man” he said to Mr. Carter. “Pay him what he thinks he is owed and let’s be rid of his whining.”

  “But Your Grace!” Mr. Carter exclaimed in consternation, “it is not our responsibility. It is the stagecoach owners who are liable. If they accept livestock, then they are bound to deliver it to its destination within a certain space of time.”

  “My dear Carter,” the Duke drawled in a manner that his servants recognised all too well as a danger signal, “I am not a bit interested in the rights and wrongs of this case. Pay the man and put a stop to his shouting at me, which is something I most dislike!”

  The farmer was paid off and once again the Duke tried to get the travelling carriage and the baggage chaise on their way. This time there was a delay when one of the outriders came rushing from the stables to declare hysterically that the bridle of his horse had been stolen.

  But after a general hue and cry it was found that the landlord’s small son had taken it away in a misguided effort to polish the silver of it even brighter than it was polished already.

  He had been so obviously trying to be helpful that the anger directed at him by his father was, the Duke considered, undeserved and he ended the matter by handing the miscreant half a guinea.

  This made the boy ecstatic and his parents so obsequiously grateful that eventually the whole cavalcade left The George and Dragon in an atmosphere of beaming goodwill.

  An over-soft feather bed and the landlord’s inferior claret and port had left the Duke with a slight headache, so he decided to ride.

  “I need the exercise badly,” he said to his Head Groom. “I will take Salamanca and go cross-country. You can tool the phaeton and we will meet at Eaton Socon. I believe the inn is called The White Horse.”

  “That is right, Your Grace,” Mr. Carter interposed.

  “You should be there early in the afternoon. Perhaps about three o’clock. Wait for me. If I am late don’t get in a pucker. I have no desire to arrive at Copple Hall before five o’clock!”

  “No, Your Grace,” Mr. Carter said, so doubtfully that it made the Duke glance at him sharply.

  “Thinking of country times for dinner?” he asked. “I have thought of it too. I have no intention, Carter, of allowing any of my hosts to dine me before eight o’clock and, if they have other ideas, then they will just have to change them.”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” Mr. Carter said humbly.

  “So – ” the Duke paused. “Perhaps to arrive at five o’clock will be too early! About six would be better. We will see. Anyway it is a fine day and Salamanca needs the exercise just like me.”

  “You are quite sure you would not like me to come with you, Your Grace?” the Head Groom asked.

  The Duke shook his head.

  “And how would you keep up with me, pray? You know as well as I do that Salamanca can out-gallop and out-trot, if necessary, every one of my other horses, however highly you may think of them.”

  “That is true, Your Grace,” the Head Groom admitted.

  “Then we will meet at The White Horse.”

  The Duke mounted the stallion, who was fidgeting, tossing his head and rearing to show his impatience to be off.

  The Duke obliged him by trotting briskly out of the town and then once they were clear of the last few cottages, taking him into the fields. Shamelessly trespassing he galloped over the flat land of Bedfordshire until both he and Salamanca felt a glow of well-being.

  They rode steadily on, Salamanca making short work of the hedges and walls they encountered.

  At lunchtime the Duke discovered an inn tucked away in a small hamlet where he enjoyed a glass of ale and ate a large hunk of cheese with a crust of newly baked bread.

  It was with a feeling of satisfaction that he proceeded, reflecting that few men had a finer mount than Salamanca and that few men could have passed a more enjoyable morning than he had with the most delectable Zazeli.

  He had indeed almost forgotten the reason for his journey and it was with a sense of dismay that he realised suddenly that Salamanca had gone lame!

  He pulled in his reins and then jumped down from the saddle to see what was amiss.

  Raising Salamanca’s offside foreleg, he saw at once a sharp stone embedded under the shoe. The Duke fortunately carried in his pocket a knife that contained just the right instrument for removing stones from a horse’s hoof.

  He applied this, but the stone was so deeply embedded that in his efforts to dislodge it he also loosened the shoe itself. It came away in his hand.

  He inspected the bare hoof in dismay. He realised t
hat the stone in lodging deep had twisted Salamanca’s fetlock. It was not a bad sprain but it was obvious that the horse should not be ridden until he was rested and reshod.

  Leading the stallion on foot, the Duke left the farm track leading across a field that, with its rough stone surface, had caused the accident and proceeded to a lane that, bordered by high hedges, was not far away.

  When he reached the lane, he found a signpost. On it was written,

  “Eaton Socon 2 miles”

  The Duke gave a sigh. He did not relish a walk of two miles in his riding boots leading his horse. And then to his left he saw a small village.

  There was the inevitable village green, a duck pond in the centre of it, a few scattered cottages with thatched roofs and an inn, all black and white and agreeably picturesque.

  There was also a Church and the Duke hoped that the village was large enough to boast a blacksmith. Leading Salamanca, who was now limping dramatically, he walked towards the inn,

  As he neared it, he then saw a young woman sitting on a wood seat outside She was wearing a green riding habit and a horse standing near her, well-bred and well-groomed enough to tell the Duke that this was no village maiden.

  He noticed that she glanced up as he appeared on the village green with an alert interest. Then to his surprise she turned her head away with a lack of curiosity that was not the usual reception the Duke had grown to expect from country wenches.

  His Grace had almost reached her side before she looked up again. Then she raised her head and he saw that she was surprisingly attractive.

  Under a small green velvet tricorn she had russet-brown hair curling on each side of a heart-shaped face that was not strictly beautiful and yet at the same time was arrestingly good-looking.

  Her eyes were very large, also brown but flecked with gold and her nose was small, straight and had an aristocratic look about it that made the Duke sweep off his hat more impressively than he had intended to do at a first glance.

  “Would you be obliging enough, ma’am, to inform me if there is a blacksmith in this village?” he asked her.

  “Yes, there is,” she replied in a soft musical voice. “Has your horse lost a shoe?”