Christine Merrill - A Wicked Liaison

‘Not for so very much longer, I hope. I am endeavouring to be out of your hair and your pocketbook with as much expedience as I can manage. But you need to help me in this, Freddy.’ She softened. ‘Please. If you will give me my allowance, I can pay my bills and will not bother you again for quite some time. Perhaps never. If you give me the deed, I can dispense with the house, and move to simpler accommodations. It will mean less expense for both of us.’

Freddy looked uncomfortable. ‘The deed is fine where it is. I really do not see the need to bother you with the care of it.’

‘Oh, it is no bother, Freddy,’ she assured him. ‘It makes sense, does it not, to keep it with the rest of my papers? And it will be one less thing you need to keep track of.’

His eyes darted around the room, as though looking for some excuse to escape the conversation. ‘I mean…really, Constance, you cannot expect me to lay hands on the thing, on such short notice.’

‘Freddy, it is not short notice at all. I have asked you for it for the better part of a year. Please can you not go into the study and bring it to me? Then I will be gone and you need not hear me ask again.’

‘Well, the truth is, Constance…’ Freddy looked more than uncomfortable, now, and had to struggle to meet her gaze ‘…the truth is, I have lost it.’

‘Do not be ridiculous, Freddy. I know it lies in the safe, in my husband’s—I mean, in your study. You could get it for me now, if you wished.’

‘Constance, you do not understand.’

‘Clearly I don’t, Freddy. Let us go to the study, now. I will show you where it is.’

His voice was lower, almost hard to hear, and he was looking at the ground. ‘It is no longer in the safe, Constance. As I told you, I lost it.’

‘Well, then let us go and search for it. It is probably among the papers in your desk.’ She could not resist a reproof. ‘Although it might have been wiser to never have removed it from the safe. It would have saved the bother now.’

‘At cards, Constance.’ He said it loud and looked her straight in the eye. ‘It is not on the desk, or anywhere else in the house. I lost it at cards. I was in my cups, and in deep play. And I am a little short of cash, until the next rents are collected.’

‘And so you paid your debt with a thing that does not belong to you.’ She looked at him in horror, as she realised just how bad things had become.

She no longer bothered to contain her temper. ‘I come here at my wits’ end, without a penny in my pocket, and you berate me for the high price of my keeping. You tell me I only want your money. As I see it, Freddy, I do not need your money nearly so much as you needed mine. You took the only thing I had that truly belonged to me and you gambled it away. And you did it because you are too busy drinking and gaming and whoring to be bothered to collect the rents on your properties, which you need to do to keep the coffers full. And now you think you can force me back to the country to play housekeeper to you, while you destroy everything my husband worked so hard to build.’

‘I am the duke now,’ he shouted back, although he sounded more like a spoiled child than a peer of the realm. ‘Not your husband. I do not have to take advice or listen to you criticise my methods. I can do as I please.’

‘Then you do not understand what it means to be a duke. Not a good one, at any rate,’ she snapped.

‘Good or bad, Aunt Constance, it would serve you to do as I say, for I am head of your family now. Uncle Robert was a fool to give you as much freedom as he did, for you seem to think that you can do just as you please, and answer to no one. I am glad that the deed is gone, and I no longer need hear you whine for it. It is time that this stupidity of maintaining an expensive residence in London is brought to a halt, and you are brought to your senses.

‘And with regard to your allowance—you will have no more money from me, not another groat, until you come to your senses and move to the dower house at Wellford, where you belong.’

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