The Desirable Duchess Read Online Free

the hunting-mad Lord Brent to the wispy and poetic Mr. Anderson, who claimed that his Scottish ancestry allowed him to actually see fairies dancing in the grass.
    As she drove her little pony and trap back home, Betty, the maid, said suddenly, “I think I saw that duke riding off in the distance over the fields. I wonder whether he has been calling on Mr. and Mrs. Lacey.”
    “Perhaps,” said Alice. “If he has, I am glad I have missed him. A very grand, formidable sort of man.”
    “Dukes always are,” said Betty dismissively.
    Alice found her parents in the downstairs Yellow Saloon, haranguing the servants. It transpired someone had left the door of the icehouse in the grounds open and the precious few blocks of ice, left over from the previous winter, had melted.
    “Someone will need to go over to the Farringdons and beg some ice,” said Mrs. Lacey, looking quite frantic. “What is a birthday party without ices? And all the furniture must be taken out of these downstairs saloons and stored. We must have decorations. Silk draped on the walls and hothouse flowers. An orchestra! We must have an orchestra.”
    “Mama, what is all this?” cried Alice. “We had agreed to have a few couples only; the drawing room would be enough for them with the carpet rolled back and the fiddler from the village.”
    “Fiddler from the—My stars, only hear the child! Alice, Ferrant is coming.”
    “But he will hardly expect us to compete with the grandeur of Clarendon,” said Alice.
    “We are not going to have the Duke of Ferrant damn us as shabby,” said her father. “Leave all arrangements to us. He called here
in person
to pay his compliments to you, Alice. I did not tell him where you were, but he said he suddenly remembered your saying you sewed for the poor on Mondays. There was no need to tell him
that
.”
    All Alice could think in the days that followed was that she would be glad when her birthday was over. Another London Season was looming on her horizon. Her parents said they were opening up the town house again next year. Her heart ached for the fickle Sir Gerald.
    She often stood on the belvedere, looking down the drive, hoping to see him ride up, hoping to hear him laugh and say it had all been a joke, that he still loved her and wanted to marry her.
    But the day before her birthday party, she looked out and saw a gardener burning leaves over near the stables.
    She went to the writing desk in her sitting room and took out a packet of letters that Gerald had sent her. Then putting on her cloak, she went down and out across the lawns to the bonfire.
    She thrust the pile of letters into the blaze and then nodded to the under gardener, who stirred up the fire so that a tongue of flame from the letters shot up into the chilly autumn air.
    Alice stood for a long time, her cloak wrapped tightly about her, gazing until all the letters had been reduced to ashes.
    Then with dragging steps, she walked slowly back to the house.

Chapter Two
    The Duke of Ferrant took a clean cravat from his valet and applied himself to tying it in the Mathematical. His valet waited anxiously, more clean cravats at the ready, but the duke’s deft fingers sculpted the starched muslin into place.
    He was preparing to go out to Alice’s birthday party. He had a gift already wrapped to take with him. It was a musical box, a pretty trifle made of carved sandalwood and lined with silk that played “My Heart’s Desire,” a song that had been popular for over ten years now. It was hard to know what to buy a young girl, as anything very expensive would be frowned on. He hoped he would not be the oldest there. What a vast gulf there seemed between his age and that of young Alice, a gulf caused not so much by years as by experience. He had fought in the Low Countries, in India, and then in the Peninsula before coming into the dukedom. Also Alice Lacey quite obviously had doting parents. He could barely remember his mother, who had died when he was