Wild Lily (Those Notorious Americans Book 1)(25)

Once more, his mother put her hand to her throat. Her eyes wide, she looked as if her husband wished to cut her throat. “George. They were your wedding gift.”

“What a sorry investment that was, eh?”

Tears cascaded down her cheeks. She struggled up from her chair. With a turn of her heel and a swish of her skirts, she raced from the room.

Silence reigned.

Elanna rose to her feet. “I will do my duty by you, Papa. I will help. I swear to it. I’ll choose a husband. One you will like.”

His gaze was for once paternal and held pity for his only daughter. “Elanna, do me and yourself a favor. Search diligently. But like him for yourself.”

Julian witnessed Elanna thank her father and, for the first time in many years, she rushed to kiss him on the cheek. Then she hurried away, a hand cupping her mouth.

“Help her, can you?” the duke asked him as he watched her leave the room.

“Find a man? Such arrangements are not easily done.”

“Well, I know it. When you’re young, the blood runs hot. Too hot to show one’s true nature. And deception does not build sound unions.”

Julian shifted in his chair. This was his father’s old story about the failure of all marriages, a metaphor for the nightmare that was his union. So he had loved his duchess when first they’d married and then what had gone wrong? From what Julian could ascertain, they had destroyed whatever respect they had, each for the other, with lies and flirtations, excessive gambling and drinking. Julian and Elanna had witnessed the results—and learned from them. He understood marriage to be a prison of mutual love and hate. Elanna, poor girl, thought their parents’ relationship to be unique.

‘The world,’ she’d once told Julian, ‘is not like that.’

Julian had looked for evidence to prove her right. He’d discovered one woman he’d thought worthy of marriage. But he’d valued her more than she him and so he’d put marriage from his mind. He’d marry to get an heir, but not for love.

“Some couples construct a congenial bond,” the duke said, morose.

“Not many.”

“I count four. Four. But they are not exempt from problems. A failed career, a malformed baby, a debilitating disease.”

The sudden tragedies that racked one. “Sad.”

“Carbury’s the only one of my acquaintance who had a complete dash of success with a woman. And what do you know, she up and died. What the hell is that for justice? I’m shocked he’s eager to marry again.”

“Elanna is in his sights. But he would expect a dowry and marriage settlement from us.” Julian had never asked what marriage portion his father had set aside for Elanna. But he had an idea of the amount. If his father wanted him to help her secure a husband, he’d have to know something of the details.

The duke rounded his desk. He sank to his chair, all the bluster of the argument out of him, deflated, diminished. He sat, running his fingers over the edges of his large ledger book—and his fingers shook. Does he have a palsy? “I have preserved some of her dowry.”

“Some?” Anger warmed Julian’s blood. “How much?”

The duke pursed his lips. “It may yield one thousand a year. Perhaps.”

A pitiful sum. And why? There was only one answer. Julian smarted at the thought. “You borrowed against it?”

The old man inhaled, firming his jaw. “I had to do it. We had to eat.”

And gamble. And whore. “I understood it to be five thousand pounds a year.”

“It was. Your grandfather Downey gave your mother such a magnificent marriage portion that I was able to invest it for any daughters soon after we married. It was in South American products.”

Julian made a fist. “Such as?”

His father smiled like a devil, ear to ear. “Bird shit.”

“I’m sorry,” Julian bit off. “Say that again.”

“In the fifties, soon after the marriage, I invested it with speculators. Men who wanted to buy bird guano from Peru and ship it here to spread as fertilizer over the soil.”

Julian knew of it, had met a few men who owned stock in import companies that shipped it in to England and Europe. In the tired soils of Britain and the Continent, the addition had improved yields double, sometimes triple, the norm. “I understood it was lucrative. I wanted to buy some myself, but the stocks were closed accounts.”

“They are. Worse, the money is bound in trust and will be granted to her husband to manage after the ceremony. Even then, he may take only ten percent of the total each year for her welfare.”

“Have you told her?”

“I thought it best she never know. Not the terms. Not the sum.”

“And Mama?”

“Does not know, either.”

“And you won’t tell her,” Julian said with certainty.

“Never. She’d harangued me to change the terms, the law be damned. She’d want it. At first it would be a portion. Then more. She’d risk it at cards or dice, lose it, lose it all. She’s a pitiful gambler, boy. You know as well as I. She’d fritter it away and then what would Elanna have?” His father sighed. “I won’t tell your mother on pain of full war in this house. You won’t tell her, either. And you know, it’s for the best.”