Nicola Cornick: Confessions of a Duchess

“Yes, my lord,” Dexter said.

“I’ll give you two months,” Lord Liverpool said. “Want the matter tied up by Christmas, Anstruther. That should give you plenty of time. If you’re lucky you might even fit in some fishing, as well. Catch the murdering miscreant fair and square, see that he implicates Sampson, as well, and if you also come back with a wealthy wife you will have done a good job.”

“Yes, my lord,” Dexter said, heart sinking. There was no reasoning with Lord Liverpool when he was in this sort of mood. And truth to tell, Dexter knew that he should not be arguing the case anyway. Lord Liverpool was right—he desperately needed a rich wife and ever since Monty Fortune had made his announcement in Brooks’s Club that night he had been thinking of going to Yorkshire to find one.

The problem, Dexter reflected, as he cast his line again, was that he was a reluctant suitor. Hence the fact that he was fishing today rather than paying court to any of the ladies gathered in the winter gardens and the pump rooms. Blatant fortune hunting offended his sense of honor. But, as Miles Vickery had helpfully pointed out to him, honor could be an expensive commodity and one that, in this context, Dexter really could not afford.

Dexter’s father had died five years before, having gambled away a fortune that he did not have. The Honorable James Anstruther had staggered out of his club on his way to a low tavern to drown his sorrows, and had finished the whole sorry business of his life by stumbling, blind drunk, in front of a carriage and leaving his eldest son with a pile of debts and six siblings to take care of. By great good fortune he had staved off his ruin until Dexter had completed his studies at Oxford, which at least ensured he could get a job in the government, but it was not well paid and the widowed Mrs. Anstruther and his younger brothers and sisters were ruinously extravagant and expensive.

Some people are blessed with one irresponsible parent; Dexter had two. In that respect The Honorable Mr. Anstruther and his wife were extremely well suited, with their gambling, their affairs and their general decadence. Dexter, the eldest child and the only one of the seven members of the “Anstruther Collection” who could definitely be assumed to be his father’s son, had watched his parents lurch from financial crisis to emotional disaster for as long as he could remember. From the age of twelve he had determined that his life was going to be the opposite of his father’s: rational, controlled and with no dangerous emotions to cloud his judgment. He would marry responsibly to a woman who would be faithful to him and his children would know exactly who their parents were. He would never tolerate for his offspring the kind of stigma and ignominy that had attached to him and his siblings: the covert smiles, the knowing looks, the veiled references to his parents’ disastrous affairs and their own illegitimacy.

Such a rational approach to life had stood him in good stead until the age of twenty-two, when he had succumbed to one spectacular, exhilarating episode of sexual abandon, during which he had lost his heart as well as his virginity and fallen hopelessly in love. The incident had been a disaster, reinforcing in the end all his beliefs about the need for a calm and controlled life. In his youth and inexperience he had miscalculated badly and thought his feelings were returned. Disillusioned and angry when he had discovered they were not, he had sought solace in liaisons with courtesans that he could ill afford until Lord Liverpool had called him gruffly to account.

There was no sound but for the call of a moorhen by the riverbank and the splash of a fish farther upstream. The day was extremely peaceful. Dexter cast his line again, thinking of the calm and rational future marriage he had planned.

“Try not to make as big a hash of this case as you did that Glory business, Anstruther,” Liverpool had said caustically as he bade Dexter farewell. “That whole affair was an utter disaster.”

Dexter shifted slightly now as he reflected on the conversation. The “Glory business” Lord Liverpool had referred to had indeed been an unfortunate case. Four years previously, Dexter and his colleague Nick Falconer had failed to capture the highway woman Glory, a popular heroine who was the darling of the Yorkshire Dales. Glory had fought for justice in her own inimitable style,righting wrongs, settling scores, taking from the rich to give to the poor in true Robin Hood style. Even now, Dexter could not quite think of Glory as anything other than a heroine, a piece of sentimentality that irritated him profoundly when he should not have been thinking about her at all.

The bobbin on the end of his fishing line dipped, indicating that a fish had taken the bait. Dexter started to reel it in.

He heard a splash followed by an expletive and then an oar drifted lazily past him, tangling briefly with the fishing line and dislodging his catch. Dexter swore, too, and again as a second oar came sailing past, knocking his fishing rod off the bank. He made a grab for it and reeled it in just as Laura, Dowager Duchess of Cole, floated past in a rowing boat.

Dexter straightened up and watched curiously.

The rowing boat was spinning slowly in the current, heading toward the fish weir. He could see Laura sitting bolt upright, clutching the sides of the boat. She seemed stunned. Dexter doubted that she could swim. Most women could not, for it was not something that they were taught. And she was perfectly right to be worried, of course. He calculated quite coolly that in a minute, two at the most, the boat would tumble over the weir and Laura would fall into the water and might well drown. She might hit her head as she fell, or her long skirts might become entangled and pull her underwater, or any number of fatal things might happen to her.

Which, arguably, was what Laura Cole deserved for giving him such a perfect night of love four years before and then shattering his heart immediately afterward,showing herself to be no more than a cold, calculating, selfish and hypocritical creature into the bargain.

Not that he was bitter.

He did not care. Laura Cole could drown, for all he cared.

Hell and the devil.

Laura Cole would drown in approximately one minute and he was standing here watching it happen.

Dexter threw down the fishing rod and wrenched off his jacket. There was no time to stop to remove his boots. He strode into the river—it was shallow at the edge but deep in the middle—just as the boat reached the top of the weir and stopped with a rather sickening crunch as the wooden frame caught on the stones at the top.

“Jump!” he shouted.

Laura turned toward him. Her face was a pale blur. She was gripping the edge of the boat so tightly that Dexter could see her knuckles white against the dark wood. She did not move.

The water was up to his chest now and the current was frighteningly strong, threatening to pull him over the top of the weir. The mossy stone of the riverbed slid beneath his feet, treacherously uneven, as he struggled to stay upright.

Dexter made a grab for the boat but in that second the keel slid with a grating roar across the stones at the top of the weir, tipped up at a steep angle and decanted Laura into the river. She disappeared over the top of the weir in a cacophony of water, her bonnet tumbling off and one of her shoes flying through the air in a perfect arc before landing with a plop in the water beside Dexter’s head. Muttering a curse, Dexter gave in and allowed the current to take him over the weir and into the deep green pool at the bottom. Even as he did it he wondered what on earth possessed him to take such a dangerous risk. He felt as though all the air had been pummeled from his body in the fall. There was the sound of rushing water in his ears, cold water that chilled him bone-deep. It filled his lungs, smothering him. He stumbled upright, shaking the water from his eyes, searching desperately for Laura.