“Ah, there you are, my boy,” said Quimbey himself. “Exuding charm in all directions, as usual.”
“Your Grace.” Tresham bowed, mostly to hide the frustration of having been caught unaware. The old fellow had too much practice sneaking about in ballrooms. “Good evening, sir.”
“Tiresome evening, you mean. Instead of glowering at all the demoiselles, you might consider standing up with one of them. You dance well enough.”
Tresham abruptly wanted to soak his head in the men’s punch bowl, which would likely result in blindness, at least, and rumors of bad blood in the Quimbey heir too.
“I dance passably, sir.”
Quimbey had paid for the dancing master. He’d paid for tutors, for the obligatory years at Eaton, three years at Oxford, for a grand tour, such as one could make a grand tour with the Corsican misbehaving. The duke had also paid for every pony Tresham had sat upon, every cravat that had been tied around his neck, until he’d reached the age of twenty-one.
“You’re accomplished at sulking too,” Quimbey said equitably. “Your father excelled at the public pout. Drove your poor mama to Bedlam and gave me several bad turns as well.”
They were in polite company, so Tresham could not retort with the truth. Papa’s philandering had driven Mama to her various excesses and dramas, and her excesses and dramas had driven Papa to his philandering. All very symmetric, a perpetuum mobile of marital misery.
“Has it occurred to you, Uncle, that you urge upon me a course you, yourself, have eschewed? Why don’t you take a bride? Snap up one of the fertile young things panting to become your duchess and leave me in peace.”
Quimbey wasn’t that old, and of all the loathings on Tresham’s long and much-visited list of loathings, assuming his uncle’s title was at the top. Quimbey had influence with half the courts in Europe, was universally liked, and commanded enormous wealth. Despite that ducal consequence, His Grace’s most trusted companion was a half-grown, stinking, drooling mastiff cast upon him by Tresham’s own departed father.
“My dear boy, even if I could stomach the notion of marrying one of these tender beauties, we have no guarantee the union would be fruitful. Your duty, irrespective of my own course, is to marry. If you prefer men, then you simply wed an accommodating woman, show the flag occasionally in the interests of ensuring the succession, and when the nursery is adequately—”
Two potted ferns closer to the door, the pair of earls had gone silent as the dancers left the floor.
“Uncle, for the love of God, stop. I know things were different in your day, but this is neither the time nor the place.”
Thirty years ago, London must have been one unending bacchanal for a man of means, with the royal dukes and the heir to the crown setting a tone of competitive dissipation. Marriage for a man with a title had been a mere formality, and for his wife little better than that once she’d delivered a pair of sons.
How Quimbey, a decent, honest, dependable fellow, had emerged from such an era was a mystery.
“Very well,” Quimbey said, “have your pout, though a bad mood only makes you look burdened and brooding. I’m promised to the Duchess of Moreland for this set. Lovely woman. Her Grace has been the making of Percy Windham too. She has at least four unmarried nieces, and they’re all fine-looking young women. Don’t let me trouble you, though, when you’re having such a jolly time glaring daggers at Polite Society.”
Quimbey sauntered away, greeting all and sundry with the casual good cheer of a man who made being a duke look easy.
Being a good duke was damned difficult. Tresham knew that. He also knew part of his resistance to marriage was simply a small boy’s terror.
Not of marriage. Marriage could be civil enough, despite the example set by Tresham’s parents.
His unreasonable, unbecoming obstinanteness was because Quimbey had been the only adult to show that small boy how a gentleman conducted his affairs, the only person to take an appropriate interest in a youth rudderless in a sea of parental drama.
And now Quimbey, unchanging, stalwart, lovable old Quimbey, was demanding that Tresham face a future that did not include his uncle. If anything happened to Quimbey, Tresham might be left with only his father’s ill-behaved hound for company.
A man should not acquire a duchess simply to preserve himself from the company of a dog, however objectionable that dog might be.
Tresham’s self-castigations were interrupted by a flash of green skirts and brunette curls moving in the direction of the stairs. Lady Della Haddonfield was without escort, and a second opportunity to accost her had at last dropped into Tresham’s lap.
He waited the requisite sixteen bars of gossip and laughter before striding after her, and to hell with whoever might have been watching.
*