One of his favorite places along the walk was a cottage located exactly two and a quarter miles from his front door. The cottage itself was ordinary enough: two stories, white walls, red trims. Its gardens, however, were worthy of a sonnet, if not a hoity-toity ode outright.
The front garden was a fantasia of roses. And not just the tight-budded roses he usually came across but full-open, immodest blooms from an earlier, less straitlaced era—big, riotous flowers weighing down bushes and drooping off trellises, ranging from the most pristine blush to a wine-dark, blowsy red.
He was curious about the back garden, where gardeners often concentrated the main of their energy and effort. But a high hedge surrounded the back garden, and all he could see was the ridge of what looked to be the roof of a sizable greenhouse. He did not wish to make the acquaintance of the cottage's residents, so he waited for that inevitable day when someone forgot to put away the ladder after trimming the hedge.
He had no scruples about peeking into a private garden. What was anyone going to do? Call the constable on him? The one thing he had learned from nearly thirty years of being a duke was that, short of actual murder, he could get away with just about anything.
Today, however, there was a ladder, though it didn't lean on the hedge. Instead, it had been put up against an elm tree across the lane from the garden. A woman stood on the ladder, her back to him, dressed in an afternoon gown much too fashionable and ridiculous for such things as climbing fifteen-foot ladders.
The woman was lecturing a cat, a kitten that she was attempting to perch on a branch twelve feet off the ground, a sight that halted Langford dead in his tracks.
“Shame on you, Hector! You are a cousin of the mighty lions of the savannah. You disgrace them! Now stay put, and you will be rescued in time.”
The kitten disagreed with her assessment. The moment she removed her hands, it leapt back into her bosom.
“No, Hector!” the woman cried as she caught the cat. “You will not do this again. You will not foil my plan. You will not be yet one more capricious male to stand between my daughter and a coronet of strawberry leaves!”
Langford's interest in the situation escalated dramatically, given that he was the only man in a fifty-mile radius known to possess a coronet of strawberry leaves—the ducal headgear worn at the coronation of a sovereign. He wasn't quite sure where his particular coronet was kept, though, there having been not a single British coronation during his lifetime.
“Listen to me, Hector.” The woman lifted the kitten until the creature's eyes were level with her own. “Listen and listen well. If you do not cooperate, I will cut every ounce of fish, liver, tongue, you name it, out of your meals. What's more, I will bring a dog into the house and feed it foie gras right in front of you. A dog, you understand, a dirty cur like Gigi's Croesus.”
The kitten meowed pathetically. The woman remained pitiless. “Now up you go, and stay this time.”
And damned if the kitten didn't obey, meowing plaintively but staying put all the same. The woman let out a long sigh and slowly descended the ladder. Langford began moving again, tapping his walking stick purposefully on the packed soil of the lane.
The woman turned at the sound. She was beautiful, with jet-dark hair, alabaster skin, and red lips, like Snow White after a few decades of happily-ever-after—and older than he'd supposed. From her voice and her figure he'd thought her somewhere in her thirties, but she was at least forty, likely more.
At the sight of him, her eyes widened to the size of gold guineas, but she recovered quickly. “I do beg your pardon, sir.” She sounded breathless, nothing like the tyrant she'd been with Hector. “I don't mean to trouble you, but I can't get to my kitty. He is stuck up high.”
He frowned. He had a fearsome frown, the kind that sent people scurrying to the opposite side of a room. “You have no groom or footman to retrieve the beast for you?”
She was clearly offended by his reference to the fur ball but swallowed it. “I have given them the afternoon off, I'm afraid.”
A woman who thought ahead, a rare phenomenon. Although, if he was pressed hard, he'd admit that men who thought ahead were equally rare. His frown deepened, but it seemed to have temporarily lost its menace, for she was not at all deterred by it.
“Won't you be so kind as to retrieve it for me?” she asked, all fluttering handkerchief and feminine helplessness.
A delightful conundrum. Should he rudely refuse and watch her crumple or play along for a bit of diversion?
“Certainly,” he said. Why not? His life had become monotonous of late. And he'd been fond of charades and tableaux in his younger days.