To Deceive a Duke Read Online Free Page B

make polite conversation or listen to some young, talentless miss play at the pianoforte. But most of Lady Riverton’s guests were also interested in antiquities, and the talk was usually lively. And, as her father had said, the food was quite good. If there was something rather odd about Lady Riverton, well, that was no different from dozens of other bored society matrons.
    At the edge of town, also with a fine view of things and perched dramatically on the hillside, was the palazzo of the Baroness Picini. It had stood empty since the Chases had arrived at Santa Lucia, the baroness having taken herself off to Naples in the court of the new queen. Today, though, the vast old place was swarming with activity, servants hurrying in and out bearing trunks and crates and furniture. The courtyard gates stood wide open.
    More guests for Lady Riverton, then , Clio thought. Despite her curiosity about who might dare to live in the mouldy old pile, she still had work to do, and turned down the steep pathway to the valley.
     
    She reached the farmhouse site just as the first raindrops started to fall. The sunken cellar area where she had begun excavating, digging out clay amphorae and jars once used for oil and wine, smelled of the sweet, earthy rain, the sulphur of lightning and the imagined remnants of the old wine. Clio shook out a tarpaulin, dragging it up and over the cellar opening and tying it down to the limestone walls. She had done it several times before, so it was quick work.
    It wasn’t much, but at least it would keep the rain from filling up her excavation trenches before she had finished. Sofar she had found only the storage jars, a terracotta altar set and one battered silver goblet, but she hoped to discover coins, jewelled goblets and crockery, perhaps even some jewellery. Something to show her father and his friends, so they would not think she had wasted her time on an insignificant site!
    She secured the tarpaulin as the rain began to fall in earnest, a soft, warm shower that pattered against the oiled canvas. Clio sat down on another square of canvas spread out on the packed dirt of the cellar, hugging her knees to her chest as she listened to the rain above her head.
    It was a strangely soothing sound, cosy as she sat in her ancient house, imagining the blessing of the water falling on the crops in the fields, the flowering orchards. Surely the people who once lived here had done the same thing, thanking Demeter, goddess of the earth and all growing things, for her bounty, making offerings in hopes of a good harvest.
    Clio had always loved envisioning the lives of the past. She could hardly get away from history, not with her family! There was her grandfather, who had written a famous treatise, The Archeology of the Ancients ; her father, who had so richly inherited those scholarly sensibilities and had used them to co-found the Antiquities Society; her mother, the daughter of a French comte renowned for his collection of Hellenistic silver; her sisters, all the Muses. They had been fed on tales of the old gods, old battles and love affairs, glories that would never die, from the time they were in their cradles.
    The classical world was as real to Clio as the everyday life of the London streets and squares—no, it was more real. More vital and true. She always took those stories far more to heart than even her sisters did, and it led her into troubletime and again—until it had all come to a terrible crescendo with the Lily Thief.
    Clio closed her eyes tightly as the rain pounded louder above her, trying to block out the memory of Calliope’s shocked eyes as she saw the truth—that Clio was the Lily Thief. ‘How could you do this, Clio?’
    Clio never wanted to hurt her sister. She loved Cal so much, loved them all, her entire boisterous, noisy, eccentric family. But so often she felt alone, even when she stood in their midst. Even as the sound and passion broke all around her, just like the rain.
    Things