The Inconvenient Duchess

Anthony fell silent.
    He continued. ‘You may not have intended to saddle me with the debts, but I mean to see them paid. I will accept no argument. Write down what you can remember of them and think no further on the subject. You will retire to my hunting lodge, while I clear your name and discuss with Miranda her wishes for the future.
    ‘When some agreement is reached between us, you will be contacted by her or me, and reunited. Whether she comes back to you with her honour and her freedom, or you come to us at Haughleigh is yet to be decided, but I will not return her to you if you must only sell her to some other man of privilege. Whatever her future may be, her duty to her past will stop with me.’

Chapter Thirteen
    M iranda was screaming. It was odd, he thought, that he should know her voice. They’d been together so briefly. But it was her, he was sure. Screaming in terror. He tried to run to her, but the ground turned to mud beneath his feet, sucking at his boots and dragging him downward.
    ‘Marcus! Help me! Marcus! Please.’ Her voice trailed off as though she was losing the strength to call him.
    He fought. Fought the sensation of sinking and the fear that at any moment the treacherous ground would close up and swallow him. There was a branch beneath his hand and he closed on it and hauled himself forward out of the mud and towards the place where he knew she must wait for him.
    He jerked awake, panting and stared around the room. He was in bed in his townhouse in London. There was no mud, of course. He was not even wearing boots. And he could not hear his new wife because she was miles away in Devon.
    It was folly to place too much credence in dreams. They were not omens of the future, after all. They were only the fancies created by an overheated mind as it sought rest.
    And that was why he’d stayed away from home all these years. Because dreams meant nothing. He sneered at his own folly. He might have stood his mother’s presence and taken up his position at Haughleigh if it hadn’t been for the damned dreams of suffocation. He’d set his life’s course by dreams.
    But what of the future? In his dreams, Miranda wanted him to come to her. If the real Miranda knew it, she would be appalled. What reason had he given her to trust him? She probably felt she needed protection from him.
    The faint morning light was seeping between the bed curtains and he rang for his valet. A shave and a wash would shake the last of the clouds from his mind. It had been ridiculous. A rescue fantasy. But, at least, not as frightening as a premature burial. He had been able to move, this time. And he had needed to get to Miranda.
    She was in need, whether she realised it or not. Her father was a pleasant enough sort, if more than a bit of a fool. He had ruined his daughter, never thinking of the future. Marcus remembered her standing in the kitchen. Trembling skin and bones. Hands with long tapering fingers, covering her face in shame and horror. Hands, which could have been be-decked with rings and toying with an ivory fan, were rough from years of hard labour marred with burns and scars.
    His mouth thinned to a tight line. Her eyes had been guarded, afraid to let out a glimmer of passion or pain, afraid that any weakness would be used against her. And her father had done it all, dragging her down in the name of love and family togetherness. And who knew what ideas she had after twelve years of listening to her surrogate mother?
    He winced as he remembered the story and the valet paused in his shaving to avoid cutting his throat.
    There was a tangled mess, and the end of the string led back to his own doorstep. The Dawson woman need not have been a whore if it hadn’t been for the machinations of his hellhound of a mother. She could have hid her shame and married well. Anthony Grey, perhaps. Or his own father. Which would make Cecily Dawson… He shrugged. His mother. Or Miranda’s. And either choice could have been a happier fate for all concer d.
    He could not turn back the clock for Cecily, but it was not too late for Miranda. His dream told him that much.

    The late summer sun was bright on the shop windows as he walked into the shopping district, warm on the fine wool of his jacket. But it had been too nice a day for the carriage, quite the nicest day he’d seen in some time, and he felt he must walk.
    Tum te tum… How did it go again? He tried to remember the ditty that had been running through his head.