Beauty and the Duke Read online

  Melody Thomas

  Beauty and the Duke

  For my husband, Thomas. My own personal hero.

  Thank you for all that you do. I love you.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  “London is becoming overrun with tourists and children,” Christine Sommers…

  Chapter 2

  Christine awoke as the sunlight burned away the darkness and…

  Chapter 3

  “Lord Sedgwick…!”

  Chapter 4

  Rain pebbled against the windows of the hack Christine had…

  Chapter 5

  Erik dismounted at the manse where his mother had lived…

  Chapter 6

  Christine tried to turn away, but Erik’s hand wrapped around…

  Chapter 7

  The steamer packet carrying Christine and her small entourage approached…

  Chapter 8

  Erik stepped inside the room adjoining Christine’s and shut the…

  Chapter 9

  Aunt Sophie’s presence stopped Christine the next morning when she…

  Chapter 10

  The first tinges of amber had tipped the clouds by…

  Chapter 11

  Christine stood in the stable doorway looking doubtfully up the…

  Chapter 12

  Erik skirted a grove of oaks and pines, pulling rein…

  Chapter 13

  Erik watched Christine pause ahead of him, her mouth taut…

  Chapter 14

  Christine lost Becca in the crowd. But she did find…

  Chapter 15

  Christine stopped just this side of a double doorway. “The…

  Chapter 16

  An hour before dawn Erik rang for Boris. Erik had…

  Chapter 17

  Three days later Erik returned. Christine had just come down…

  Chapter 18

  Erik hit the frigid water and went under. Sucked down…

  Chapter 19

  Christine awakened just before dawn and realized she must have…

  Chapter 20

  Christine’s voice touched Erik first, a moment before she and…

  Chapter 21

  “They are inside waiting, your grace,” Attenborough said. “The countess…

  Chapter 22

  Erik and Christine tore up their contract that night. They…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Melody Thomas

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  London

  1840

  “London is becoming overrun with tourists and children,” Christine Sommers stated to her friend and assistant, Amelia, from her seat atop the stone steps leading into London’s popular museum of antiquities. Shifting her attention from the children running around wildly and screeching like banshees in the park next to the massive hydra fountain, she folded her hands over her reticule. “I have always lived by the dictum that all children are best kept locked away until they can behave like adults.”

  “Which is why I am a teacher and you are an administrator.”

  “I am a paleontologist.”

  Behind her, a footman opened the museum’s double doors and laid out the red carpet in preparation for the evening’s private gala. A thousand invitations had gone out last month. Fifteen hundred had come back. Tonight would be a crush.

  She relaxed her death grip on her beaded reticule as she continued to observe the last stragglers trickling out of the museum and onto the walks. She told herself she was not suffering nerves. Why should she be? The early evening air was pleasantly warm for May, the sunset only slightly dulled by cloud cover. The evening could not be more perfect.

  As usual, Christine had arrived too early. Why couldn’t she be fashionably late to an event just once in her life? And perhaps, in hindsight, it would have been wiser had she taken into account her need to breathe before she let Amelia stuff her into the corset that squeezed her torso. She felt like a sausage ready to be hung on a rack and cured.

  “You look beautiful,” Amelia said as if reading Christine’s thoughts.

  Christine looked down at her skirts. The cornflower-blue satin trimmed in blond matched her eyes. “You don’t think this gown makes me look like a courtesan, do you?”

  Amelia’s musical laughter turned the heads of a group of gentlemen loitering on the cobbles below them. Her shining gold hair beneath the hood of her pale yellow cloak seemed to draw the weak light to her face and she positively glowed. Amelia was one of those rare individuals in Christina’s life who possessed the power to pull light from the very air around her. Moments like this, Christine found herself jealous of her friend.

  “And if it does?” Amelia asked. “What do you care what others think? You certainly haven’t cared at any other time. It is all right for you to step out of your lab and look pretty once in a while.”

  Adjusting her silver-framed spectacles, Christine was about to protest when Amelia suddenly popped to her feet and began pacing like a restless mare before a race.

  “I do wish Mr. Darlington would hurry.” She stopped her pacing and tented a gloved hand over her eyes. “He should be here by now. Tonight is important.”

  Tonight was the Fossil Society’s annual spring gala and the most passionate bone collectors and hobbyists were beginning to arrive. Collectors from as far away as America had come to be the first to view the new exhibits that would open to the public next week, of which Christine’s contribution was a part—a fossilized metacarpal she and Joseph Darlington discovered last month in Dorset.

  Tonight, the famous C. A. Sommers, author of the scandalous book that pit the infant science of paleontology against old-world mythology was also a candidate for the Fossil Society’s highest award. Christine had kept her promise to her father to publish the book, a book examining the theory that great beasts once roamed the earth, and touting the possible existence of dragons. A book that historians mocked, and a theory that eventually destroyed her father’s once lucrative career.

  The book would never be a contender for next year’s distinguished Copley Medal award, but Christine had every confidence No Beast of Myth would win tonight’s less-than-prestigious honor. It was given by an organization that consisted of stargazers and romantics, all of whom thrived on the preposterous fringes of the absurd.

  But tonight was important to Christine for another reason altogether. Sometimes a woman simply had to take matters into her own hands when it came to determining her future.

  Joseph Darlington had once been her father’s most promising assistant. Two months ago, he had finally returned from a fellowship at Edinburgh, and Christine realized she had come to a bend in her life. She was eight and twenty, after all, and though she had long since risen above the romantic inclinations that seemed to assail youth, she did not want to awaken ten years from now and find herself irrelevant in a world that had passed her by.

  Last week, she had applied to the museum board of trustees to head up an expedition to Perth, Australia. The team leader had recently expired of a heart attack. She knew the trustees were in desperate need of a paleontologist and stood to lose their funding if they could not secure a team before the end of the month. Even if Christine was a woman, no other scientist had her credentials and could save the expedition on such short notice. They could not deny her this time, and she was convinced she would be given the appointment tonight during the award ceremony.

  To that end, she wanted to share her passions with a like-minded man. She was a woman of action and circumstance, after all.

  Tonight was one such occasion where action was required to make something happen. Joseph Darlington might be as brilliant a paleontologist
as she, but he was also a man. And beneath her velvet evening mantelet, Christine knew she looked as bold as she could manage for a woman who was about to ask a man to wed her.

  Amelia’s pacing stopped. “Mr. Darlington is here.”

  Christine turned her head and glimpsed Joseph Darlington stepping down from a carriage that had stopped behind a long line of carriages from which finely dressed patrons of the museum descended. Her heart did a flip-flop, and she rose from the stone bench where she had been sitting to better observe him over the growing crowd.

  As always, he looked handsome and dapper. His wheat blond hair, brown eyes and perfect smile were all attributes that distinguished him in a scientific community filled with stodgy old windbags who would as soon steal a fossil from a fellow scientist as find one themselves.

  “I wish I were not so nervous.” Amelia raised her hand to wave.

  Christine grabbed Amelia’s wrist before her friend could yell helloo over the heads of the crowd. “What are you doing…?”

  But her words died on her tongue, for Joseph Darlington was not alone.

  Behind him, another man filled the carriage doorway, his dark evening cloak delineating a pair of broad shoulders. Christine stilled. Even the bouncy Amelia grew silent. Christine knew at once who he was. As the man stepped out of the conveyance and unfolded to a great height, the setting sun’s fiery glow threw his saturnine features into harsh relief. A swath of silver showed in his dark-as-night hair. As he settled a top hat on his head, Christine held back a gasp.

  Amelia leaned nearer. “It is he! The Duke of Sedgwick. Mr. Darlington said Lord Sedgwick had written and expressed an interest in attending this event. Lord Bingham will be beside himself that someone is here tonight of higher rank than he.”

  Normally that thought would have made Christine smile. Bingham was a pretentious snob.

  At the sight of the notorious duke, a frisson of awareness aroused a familiar unpleasant sensation in Christine’s chest. It was not unlike the way she felt when she smoked her father’s old cob filled with strange tobacco from Bolivia or breathed in the fermented distillates that preserved her collection of lizards and frogs. The duke held out his gloved hand to a pretty girl, swathed in pink flounces, who looked no older than the students in Amelia’s class.

  “That must be his sister,” Amelia added behind her gloved hand.

  Then Joseph spotted them at the top of the stairs. And just that quickly, the joy she felt being near her oldest friend suffused the restiveness that had momentarily sparked memories of a time in her youth she wished only to forget. Joseph had a way of putting her in control of her feelings and refocusing her purpose.

  “When did Mr. Darlington tell you that Lord Sedgwick had written to him?” Christine asked Amelia.

  Amelia flitted her hand airily. “I don’t know. Last month,” she answered without turning. “Somehow I thought Lord Sedgwick would be…less, um…”

  “Less what?”

  “Young?” The fan that had been dangling from Amelia’s wrist suddenly popped open and her voice lowered to a whisper. “They say he bears the mark of the Sedgwick curse. His first wife died of scarlet fever. His second wife…well, no one knows for sure what happened to her. But her ghost haunts the crags around Fife. Do you suppose his grace is attending tonight with his sister because he is cursed and no other woman will go near him?”

  Sometimes Christine could not believe Amelia was only three years younger. “He is a duke, Amelia. He can be with whomever he wants.”

  The ton’s scandalous vagaries were normally a matter of limited interest to Christine. But when it came to the infamous Erik Boughton, Duke of Sedgwick, who lived in his castellated estate north of Edinburgh and rarely ventured to London, she knew more than most.

  He had not been born into wealth and power, but one would never know that, looking at him now. He’d been a child of two when the death of a cousin left him the sole heir to a duchy that made up a sizable piece of Fife. At seventeen, he’d won a very public trial that forcibly removed his stepfather as tutelary to the Sedgwick estate and bestowed on the young duke sole custody of his half-sister. Twenty-one when he made his fortune in the iron-ore industry and twenty-four when he married for the first time.

  Men like Sedgwick who ruled small empires did not seek their amusement at a gala hosted by the London Fossil Society. Of that, Christine was sure.

  But as she watched his approach, a current went through her, a faint resonance of the awareness she had felt just moments ago when he had stepped out of the carriage, the same restiveness she had felt the first time she met him years ago during her first and only season. Unsettled, she looked away and found a row of beads on her sleeve to study.

  Beside her, Amelia waved at Joseph, making a spectacle of herself on the steps as he approached. “Does not Mr. Darlington look dapper tonight? I will have to tell him so, I think.”

  And Amelia did, the instant he arrived in front of them—words that faded to the background of Christine’s thoughts as Sedgwick followed behind him and Christine could not help staring at him. He still possessed a face more harsh and riveting than handsome. He was not smiling as his eyes came to rest on her face.

  Christine was tall for a woman, and tonight she had worn flat slippers to make her height less awkward to Joseph. But standing next to Lord Sedgwick, she did not have that problem. In fact, he was one of the few men of her acquaintance with whom she had to tip her chin to look into his face. She had not stood this close to him in ten years.

  The girl beside Lord Sedgwick clasped her hands, gazing across the courtyard. The newer east wing extension of Montague House housed the Library Gallery, a magnificent addition to the museum. “Have you ever seen anything so…so wondrous, Erik?” The girl faced Christine as Joseph introduced Lord Sedgwick and his sister, Lady Rebecca.

  Lady Rebecca dipped and her frothy pink gown rustled. Glossy black hair drawn to the back of her head fell in an abundance of curls over one shoulder. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Miss Sommers. Truly. Professor C. A. Sommers’s book sits in our library. Tell her, Erik.”

  Then Christine was looking into his sherry-colored eyes, surprised that a man with Erik’s background and aptitude would read what many in the literary and scientific communities considered intellectual twaddle. “You are familiar with my father’s work?”

  “He read the book,” Lady Rebecca said, forging onward like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering girth and speed. “And he did not throw it away, which is always a good sign. Erik is very strict about what he will allow me to read. We are here tonight because he promised that while we are in London we could see this exhibit.” She smiled up at Joseph, and Christine sensed Amelia stiffen. “It was our good fortune that my brother met Mr. Darlington at Edinburgh University some months ago and knew whom to contact.” She shifted her attention to the massive hydra fountain. “Is it not remarkable, Erik?”

  Curious about the girl’s reaction, Christine adjusted her spectacles and peered at the fountain.

  Carved from stone, the life-like many-headed reptile painted red and gold and with claws extended dominated the square in a spectacular watery display. It looked as if it had swooped down from the sky to snatch up—and deservedly so-—those unruly pint-sized humans destroying the flowerbeds in a game of cricket and violating the ambiance inspired by the drama.

  Amelia’s gaze also landed on the fountain. “’Tis a hideous sea serpent, to be sure.” She shuddered, her delicate features incapable of frowning, no matter the occasion.

  “Hydra,” Christina corrected, unwilling to allow even a friend to blaspheme such a work of art, even unintentionally. “The fountain is a dragon.”

  “Hydra, basilisk, sea serpent, dragon—” Amelia fluttered a dainty gloved hand. “Is your father not the one who told us they were all the same beast beneath the myths? Is he not the one who told the Fossil Society last year that whatever they had learned about monsters not existing was a lie? Mrs. Hubble’s h
usband still refuses to allow his wife to return to the meetings for the nightmares he caused her to suffer.”

  “What about you?” Lord Sedgwick queried. Four pairs of eyes turned to him, but his eyes were focused on Christine. “Do you believe in dragons, Miss Sommers?”

  Only fools and children allowed themselves to believe in myths and fairy tales. “I am a scientist,” she said after a moment.

  Amelia suddenly laughed. “Good heavens, Miss Sommers is much too serious to believe in anything fantastical. She is a woman of discipline. Not romance.”

  Christine looked at Amelia. The first time she had made that remark, Christine had laughed and agreed, but that observation now disturbed her.

  Lady Rebecca peered shyly at Christine. “Miss Sommers. Mr. Darlington said you are a passionate paleontologist. I guarantee it is of no offense to find another kindred soul in a woman.” She pressed a fisted hand to her breast. “I, too, am passionate. I so envy Mr. Darlington’s expedition to Australia. You must as well. He was telling us all about it on the way over here.”

  Lord Sedgwick coughed into his gloved hand. “I believe he also said he had not broken the news to anyone, Elf.”

  Christine did not understand. The look in Joseph’s eyes left her floundering and sifting through the past week’s conversations for clues as to Lady Rebecca’s reference. “Perth? Australia?” Her Perth?

  “Yes. Perth,” Joseph said and she saw a sheepish look in his eyes. “I approached them last week.”

  “He is the new team leader,” Amelia said, pride obvious.

  Joseph slid his hand over Amelia’s, pulling her nearer to his side. “We could not tell anyone until Lord Bingham informed me of the final decision this afternoon.” His gaze slid to Amelia. “Now is as good a time as any to share the rest of our news. Amelia has consented to be my wife and will be traveling with me as my assistant.”

  Christine stared at them, dumbfounded. The bile of bitterness rose in her throat and she desperately tried to swallow it, but could not.

  After a moment of awkward silence, Lord Sedgwick cleared his throat and took his sister’s arm. “I think this conversation no longer concerns us, Elf.”