Ten Days with a Duke: 12 Dukes of Christmas #11 Page 8

  His father was here.

  “Join me in my suite,” the marquess demanded. “Now.”

  The more witnesses, the safer, had been his boyhood rule around his father, but Eli was the larger man now, had been so for years, and no longer feared his father’s violence.

  In turn, the marquess had found countless new ways to twist the knife without lifting a finger.

  “After you.” Eli followed him up the marble stairs in search of privacy.

  Whatever the marquess had to say was not something Eli wished to be overheard.

  His father’s suite was on the fifth floor, with a stunning vista that stretched for miles. The window was barely visible due to the retinue of servants cowering before it.

  This wasn’t castle staff. These were familiar faces from the London town house. Maids, footmen, even an under-butler. Eli hadn’t been permitted his valet, yet the marquess—

  Eli laughed to himself, startled. His valet wrung his pale hands on the other side of an even paler chambermaid. Eli hadn’t been allowed to bring his valet because the marquess had already poached him.

  Just another of the fun little ways Father liked to prove his superiority.

  “Let’s make this quick,” Eli said, knowing that failing to comment on his valet’s presence would rankle the marquess more than an argument. “Why are you here?”

  “Make this quick?” Father’s face empurpled. “You were supposed to be finished by now. Harper said his daughter negotiated a ten-day reprieve, but it shouldn’t take that long to—”

  “You’ve been corresponding with Mr. Harper?” Eli said in surprise.

  “Someone has to keep me informed, since your letters are less than satisfactory. How difficult can this be, Elijah? If the chit won’t obey her father, just spread a little gossip. It’s simple.”

  “No,” Eli said flatly. “Anything she does must be her decision.”

  “You’d be the first man who thinks so,” the marquess scoffed. “And only a fool dares tell me no.”

  Eli sighed. “I’m honoring our agreement.”

  “You’re dragging your feet,” his father snapped. “I’ll be watching from this window until the task is complete.”

  Of course he would.

  His father smirked. “At least you needn’t kiss her this time. That’s a relief, eh?”

  Eli glared back in stony silence, biting back a retort. Claiming no wish to kiss Olive was a lie, but admitting he’d already done so would only give the marquess more kindling to use against her.

  His father gestured toward a sideboard.

  The entire retinue scrambled to prepare his glass of port.

  “All you need is a ‘yes,” the marquess said as though he were speaking to a child, “so that you can say ‘no.’”

  “I’m aware of the terms.” Eli had hated them then. He hated them even more now.

  Father settled in a comfortable chair and raised his glass of port.

  Eli stayed on his feet, port-less. He would not be staying long.

  “Don’t ruin this,” his father warned. “I could not have devised better revenge.”

  If only Mr. Harper had never sent that cursed offer of reconciliation!

  Eli’s father never forgave. The only thing the Harpers could offer the marquess was their utter humiliation.

  So he’d set out to engender it.

  Mr. Harper wanted a betrothal? He could have one. As soon as his daughter agreed to the match, Eli was to jilt her—the more publicly, the better—embarrassing her and her father both. The Harpers would be mortified to realize that neither they nor their farm held any interest to the marquess and his son. The current scheme was no more than a moment’s entertainment, like burning an ant with sunlight and a shard of glass.

  That was the marquess’s plan.

  Eli had been interested in Olive from the first moment he’d heard of her. His father was petty enough to enact vengeance for any slight, no matter how small, but the Harpers were the only foes daring enough to deserve a feud.

  When he’d met her, that interest had coalesced into something deeper. She was everything his father feared and more: clever, talented, beautiful.

  And forbidden. Then, as now.

  The first of the marquess’s many stipulations to this wretched venture was that neither of the Harpers could suspect Eli’s interest wasn’t in earnest. He couldn’t simply tell Olive what he was about, then feign a betrothal and a messy split, and hope to pull the wool over his father’s eyes.

  The marquess would know if Eli had followed instructions. The marquess would send spies to verify.

  The marquess was here, now, because he rightfully suspected his son’s disinclination to cause Olive pain, no matter the reason.

  “Be quicker,” said his father, “and I’ll give you two years instead of one. Deny me, and I’ll have you barred from your precious physic garden.”

  There.

  That was the reason. The carrot and the stick dangling in front of Eli’s nose.

  The marquess knew his son wanted to devote himself to the science of botany, and why. Eli half-suspected his father had forbidden it all these years, just to have something to barter with when the appropriate situation arose.

  Eli’s situation started the day he was born.

  His mother, God rest her soul, had seemed fine at first, but the placenta had broken during the delivery, and the resulting infection stole her life within a fortnight.

  Eli had blamed himself for years. Not that an infant had any control over whether a uterus properly expelled a placenta. A chemist, on the other hand… there was potential. If only he could find the right ingredients. A plant that could prevent tragedy.

  “I’ve found a chemist who can turn our theory into reality,” Eli explained urgently.

  The marquess looked bored. “You can lose him just as easily.”

  Finding a path to the cure hadn’t been easy at all.

  The year Eli was born, a group of scholars founded the Linnean Society to study natural history and define taxonomies. Their star, the great physician William Withering, had just discovered the healing properties of foxglove. It was proven to aid previously untreatable heart irregularities, including paroxysm of the heart. Foxglove’s full applications were still unknown, but countless experiments were underway for everything from inflammation to influenza.

  Not for combating childbed fever, however, no matter how common death was. Women’s anatomy was not a priority when it came to research.

  No cure or preventative measure would be discovered, unless Eli did so himself.

  So he’d tried. Learnt everything he could about botany, about natural philosophy, even alchemy. It was plants he came back to, time and again.

  “My research—” he began.

  “I don’t give a damn about your research.”

  “You should,” Eli said softly.

  When he learned that the famous women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft had died the same way as his mother, Eli corresponded with her physicians, and amassed a web of chemists and apothecaries interested in preventing such a terrible fate from happening to more women.

  Eli could not save his mother—he was too late for that—but if he could save other children’s mothers, then any sacrifice would be worth it.

  The problem was that experts did not work for free.

  He needed the best chemists on the project, and he had no money at his disposal to tempt them. His web of brilliant apothecaries and chemists had disappeared one by one into projects that paid and no longer returned his letters.

  All except for one. In November, Eli and his last remaining colleague had achieved a breakthrough. They had analyzed countless midwives’ poultices, teas, and folk remedies, and isolated three ingredients that appeared to induce labor. Could the same plants aid in the expulsion of detached placentae? It was very promising. For the first time, Eli had concrete reason to hope.

  What he didn’t have was time to waste… or money
to fund the necessary experiments and trials.

  “Well?” said his father. “Does twice the funding meet your approval?”

  Twice the funding was a miracle.

  Eli and his partner were perhaps mere months away from discovering a compound that could save women’s lives, and give more children a chance to know their mother’s love… if Eli could produce the blunt to finance the project by the end of the month.

  His chemist already had an invitation to a different, more lucrative study. He needed Eli’s final offer within the next fortnight or he, too, would vanish.

  The opportunity would have been lost.

  Eli’s allowance was paltry by design. He had to beg his father’s approval for every expenditure. “Playing with flowers” was not an approved expense. Eli wouldn’t have been able to afford a week of the chemist’s time, much less months or a year.

  Until Mr. Harper’s letter arrived.

  “Two years,” Eli repeated. “Any studies I wish, at any cost?”

  “You couldn’t beggar me if you tried,” the marquess said with a laugh. “Yes, yes, I’ll fund an entire team of chemists. Behold, my witnesses.” He waved a careless hand in the general direction of his hovering servants. “You can build the laboratory. It will be worth it to know I beat Harper at his most vulnerable.”

  With two years of unlimited finances, a no-expense-spared laboratory, and an entire team of brilliant chemists at his disposal, Eli could achieve many more good works than his original small dream. Once this form of childbed fever was cured, they could move on to the next project, and the next.

  Eli would help countless more people than he would harm.

  There were just two.

  Olive and her father.

  Eli rubbed his temples. He wished his father’s stipulations felt more like a grand opportunity for medicine and less like blackmail.

  Ever since that day behind the stables when Eli had first kissed Olive, he’d sworn never again to harm another. To do everything in his power to do as much good as humanly possible.

  Saving lives was very, very good.

  But hurting Olive, again...

  The kisses meant nothing, she said. She didn’t want to marry him, she said.

  Perhaps their fathers were right, and she would agree to the match anyway, as an obedient daughter was meant to do, despite her resentment.

  Maybe she would even be relieved when Eli did not go through with it, leaving her in full possession of her precious farm... but with her reputation—and confidence—in tatters.

  “What if she doesn’t get over it?” he asked quietly.

  His father smirked in satisfaction. “All the better.”

  All the worse.

  Eli’s hands clenched into fists, but it was impossible to say who he was angriest with—his father, or himself.

  The marquess did bad things to harm others and felt good about it.

  Eli was doing a bad thing to help others and it was eating him up inside.

  Even if the result helped hundreds of thousands more people than he harmed, he couldn’t bear to hurt Olive again.

  “No.”

  The servants flinched.

  Only a fool used that word to Lord Milbotham.

  His eyes glittered. “What did you say?”

  “No,” Eli repeated. “‘First do no harm.’ The Hippocratic oath—”

  “You don’t obey dead scholars,” the marquess spat in disgust. “You obey me.”

  Eli took a deep breath. “She deserves kindness and the truth.”

  “She doesn’t even deserve to negotiate terms. She’s just a girl, Elijah. She’s nothing. She doesn’t even have to like you. She’s to do as her father commands and agree to the betrothal. Then you’re to do as your father commands, and jilt her. Make up something funny. Tell her you got confused between her and one of her horses. It’s supposed to wound. Humiliation is the entire point.”

  “I’m not part of your feud.” He wished he never had been.

  “Of course you’re in this war with me. You’re my heir, aren’t you? Blood is everything, Elijah. Nothing else matters. You are sixth in line to an earldom—”

  “There is no earldom,” Eli burst out. Inheriting a legitimate title had always been his father’s dream. “You’re fifth in line only because your nephews haven’t married yet. Everyone in our family seems to sire sons. By this time next year, you could be eighth in line. And the year after that—”

  “It doesn’t matter what my nephews do,” the marquess interrupted. “I’ve Prinny on my side.”

  For a moment, no one in the room seemed to breathe.

  Eli stared at his father. “You’ve got what?”

  “Prinny,” the marquess repeated. “The Harpers made an enemy of him when they refused to sell him that stallion. It was the first time the caricatures came out in their favor. The Regent does not appreciate being mocked. The night you were supposed to have finished this business, he was heard to say that if someone were to teach the Harpers a lesson, he’d be of a mind to grant that person a title in their own right.”

  “Who did he allegedly say this to? The gossips—”

  “He said it to me.” The marquess gloated. “It’s the perfect revenge. Not only will I have humiliated the Harpers, I will become literally, legally, publicly superior—at their expense.”

  Eli’s stomach bottomed.

  This was his father’s dearest wish come true. There would be no talking him out of it now. Not with the personal favor of the Prince Regent at risk.

  “Besides,” drawled the marquess, holding out his empty glass to the horror of the suddenly scurrying servants. “It’s too late to be noble, Elijah. You’ve already begun. Miss Harper shan’t forgive you, regardless. It’s up to you if you want to make your deception worth it.” He tilted his newly filled glass toward Eli and smiled. “Do you want to save women like your mother or not?”

  Chapter 9

  The Sixth Day

  It was the last day of the year.

  Although Eli awoke before dawn, he did not rush outside to Olive as he longed to. Instead, he took his research to the dining table and spent the morning brooding at the small piles.

  It had taken eight years to get this far. And if he defied his father, the research would not go any further. More women would die. Children’s mothers. Children who would be lost and alone without their mothers’ love.

  Eli didn’t have the chemical expertise to continue—not that his father would allow such study—nor did Eli have the resources to build a laboratory or pay wages.

  The meeting he’d missed this week was with the chemist he’d promised to sponsor once Eli returned to London. He’d sent a letter apologizing for the delay.

  But the person Eli most wished he could apologize to was Olive.

  The first time he’d hurt her, the only person he’d been trying to save was himself. He would carry that shame for eternity. It was his biggest regret.

  And here he was, planning to do it again.

  This time, he was trying to save women’s lives. Perhaps even save Olive herself. When she met someone worthy of her, she might become a mother and need the very substance Eli’s chemist would produce in order to survive the delivery of her baby.

  It didn’t make him feel any better about his duplicitousness.

  He pushed his books aside. Rather than wither with time, Eli’s schoolboy tendre had ripened into love. But strong emotion was dangerous. If his father suspected the truth, Eli’s love would become ammunition. Something else to snatch away, in the name of retribution.

  As furious as he was with his father for his cold-blooded manipulation, the marquess was right: Stopping now would mean losing Olive and any hope for cures. And that would be only the beginning.

  With Prinny’s promise hanging in the balance, Father’s decades-long feud with the Harpers would seem positively benevolent compared to the marquess’s vindictiveness should his son defy him now.

  If Eli so much a
s breathed a word of caution to Olive, Father’s rage would turn on her. The marquess did not take betrayal lightly. He would destroy Olive with merciless savagery, simply because it would destroy Eli as well.

  He rubbed his face as though he could scrub the image away. When he lifted his hands, Mr. Harper was standing in the door to the dining room.

  Mr. Harper smiled and gestured with his hands.

  Eli pointed to himself and then to his books.

  With exaggerated gestures, Mr. Harper jabbed a finger at Eli, then pointed in the direction of the horses.

  And Olive.

  Even Eli could not pretend to misunderstand the message. Why are you in here when Olive is out there? Go to her!

  Mr. Harper sought a reconciliation that had no hope of happening. He also loved his daughter. Which meant he approved of a union between Eli and Olive. He looked at Eli and saw a son-in-law. He saw happiness for his daughter.

  There was nothing Eli wouldn’t give for all of that to be true.

  He nodded his understanding to Mr. Harper and packed up his research. It was New Year’s Eve. A day of reflection and renewal.

  Even though he hated himself for it, Eli’s stomach already fluttered with anticipation at the thought of seeing Olive. Touching her, kissing her, just being in the same vicinity as her. She was the sunlight to his seedling.

  As always, when he stepped out into the cool morning air, the sight of her stole his breath.

  She was holding court in the middle of a group of horses, talking to them about who-knew-what. As he watched, she pulled a large carrot out of a pocket, took a bite from the tip, then offered the rest to Duke.

  Eli’s lips could not help but grin at such an endearing gesture. Olive was sweet and strong, adorable and majestic. He could not help but love her. Nor could he stay away.

  He set out toward the fence.

  The horses scented him first, flaring their nostrils and tilting their ears in his direction.

  Olive glanced over. A smile transformed her face from merely pretty to heart-wrenchingly beautiful. She sauntered toward the fence.