The Duke’s Perfect Wife (MacKenzies & McBrides #4)(79)
Author: Jennifer Ashley

Well, she would not sit here staring into the distance and being maudlin. She stood up, brushed off her skirt, and started asking those in and around the gardens—discreetly—whether they’d seen anyone odd coming into or out of the gardens in the middle of Grosvenor Square.

The evening after Hart had sent Lewis to leave the signal to Eleanor, Reeve, down on the shingle, leaned against the boat’s hull and lit his pipe. Hart sat above him on the deck, eating bread dunked into the soup Mrs. Reeve had left for him. Mrs. Reeve and Lewis had gone, tired, to their beds, Lewis having earned Hart’s praise—and promise of shillings—for a job well done.

Reeve had been in the tunnels all day, Mrs. Reeve taking the opportunity to visit her sister, so Lewis had had plenty of time to purchase and drop the flower in place and then linger to watch Eleanor find it. Hart listened hungrily to Lewis’s description of her lifting the flower to her nose, her face flushed in happiness, how she’d pressed the violet to her heart. Then with alarm when Lewis told him how she’d walked about the square, questioning people. Of course, Eleanor would not simply pick up the flower and quietly return home.

He longed for her with a sharpness that hurt. Every night Hart dreamed of Eleanor’s fiery hair, her blue eyes, the sweet sounds she made when he was deepest inside her. His darker fantasies returned, and in his dreams, Eleanor surrendered to every one of them. He’d wake hard and sweating, his body aching.

Hart pulled his thoughts from his frustrating dreams when Reeve’s words caught his attention.

“I heard tell in the pub that the duke everyone said would be prime minister won’t be now,” Reeve said. “Seeing as how they can’t find him.”

He said it too easily, too lightly. Hart kept chewing bread, letting nothing show on his face.

“What do ye think of that?” Reeve asked.

Hart finished his bread. “I’m not English. Not interested.”

“This duke, they say, was a Scotsman,” Reeve went on as though he’d not spoken. “What you might call an eccentric. Always wore one of them Scottish skirts, like you had when I found you.”

“Kilts,” Hart said.

“He went missing when the bomb went off in Euston station. Some thought he might have a-fallen into the tunnels, and most think he was washed, dead, into the Thames.” Reeve stopped to tamp the tobacco into his pipe and relight it. “Seems like I would have found him, had the man been trapped down in the interceptors.”

Hart said nothing. Reeve studied him with his keen dark eyes as he tamped his pipe again.

“People disappear all the time,” Hart said. “Sometimes never to be found again.”

Reeve shrugged. “Happens that some men disappear for their own reasons.”

“They do. They’re found when they’re ready to be found.”

“This man were rich as anything, by all accounts. I’d think he’d want to go home to his palace, sleep in a soft bed, and eat off silver plates.”

Hart rubbed his chin, feeling the unfamiliar beard. He’d glimpsed himself in the small, foggy mirror in the cabin earlier today, and he’d nearly recoiled, thinking he’d seen the ghost of his father. A hairy man with glittering eyes had looked out at Hart from the mirror—a fiery-tempered, arrogant man who’d believed in himself too much.

Or had he? Perhaps Hart’s father had hated himself with the same self-loathing Hart sometimes felt, the man lashing out instead of turning his anger inward. The old duke was dead and gone now, and so Hart was never to know.

Reeve puffed on his pipe. “Might be worth this duke’s while to not be found, eh?”

Hart held Reeve’s gaze. “It might be. If he’s that rich, he can do what he likes. Just as a man who feeds his family by picking through other men’s trash instead of looking for a job in a factory.”

Reeve snorted. “Factories. Backbreaking work all hours of the day and night, shut away and never watching your boy grow up. Freedom, that’s worth all them plates of silver and a fine palace.”

“I agree.”

They exchanged another look. “Then we’re the same, are we?” Reeve asked.

“I believe so.”

Reeve made another elaborate shrug, leaned back, and sucked heavily on his pipe. “Well, I hope they find the bugger. The pipes under London can be deadly.”

“So I understand.”

Reeve went back to smoking quietly, and Hart gazed across the river, making his plans.

After a time, Reeve stirred. “Pub?”

Hart gave him a silent nod, and the two men left the boat to cross the shingle and mount the stairs to the streets.

The inhabitants of the pub had grown used to seeing Hart come in with Reeve, accepting Reeve’s story that Hart was an itinerant worker, down on his luck, helping Reeve in return for a bed and food. Reeve talked to his cronies, and they all ignored Hart, who accepted a pint from the landlord and kept his head down while he read through a newspaper cover to cover.

David Fleming had taken over the coalition, he saw. Good. David would know what to do. The coalition was popular, because Gladstone, to most people, smacked of radicalism and revolution, and the Tories favored the large landholders. Hart’s party was somewhere in between, something for everyone. Hart had planned it that way.

The elections, the newspapers said, were sure to return the men in the coalition, and Fleming, as the new head, would lead the government. The queen was not overly fond of Fleming—or Hart, for that matter—but she liked Gladstone still less.

The papers were more full of worries about Khartoum and Gordon and the Germans slowly taking over southern Africa than the missing Duke of Kilmorgan. A small story in one newspaper reported that Hart’s body had not been found, but the Thames was deep and never-stopping. A sad end for so proud a man as Hart Mackenzie. Scotland was in mourning for him, but England wasn’t. Bloody good riddance, the English paper did not say but might as well have.

He found a story on the last pages that the Mackenzie family was leaving the city to retire to Scotland. Good, Hart thought. Eleanor will be well taken care of there. Eleanor was like wild Scottish heather, happy when rippling free on Scottish hills, constrained when cut and shoved into a confining vase.

The same story said that Lord Cameron Mackenzie would be taking the coronet as duke once his oldest brother was proclaimed officially dead.

Hart touched Cameron’s name and stifled his laughter. Cameron must be boiling with rage. His brother’s greatest fear in life had been that Hart would peg it early and leave the dukedom to him. Hart imagined all the colorful names Cameron was calling him. But Hart knew that Cameron would take care of everyone very well. Cam’s greatest strength was his ability to protect those he loved.