To Desire a Devil (Legend of the Four Soldiers #4)(78)

The servant bowed to Reynaud. “They’re waiting within, my lord.”

Reynaud nodded. “Thank you.”

The dark little room he entered was sparsely furnished. Four rows of wooden benches sat facing a large wood table. Beside the table was a single tall chair. The room was loud with the voices of men, for the benches were nearly full. There were twenty members of this Select Committee for Privileges, appointed from the House of Lords to decide the matter of his title. As Reynaud found a seat, the chairman of the committee, Lord Travers, got up from where he’d been sitting with Beatrice’s uncle on the front bench. He saw Reynaud, nodded, and went to stand before the tall chair.

“My lords, shall we begin?”

The room gradually quieted, although total silence was not achieved, because several members continued to murmur, and one elderly lord was cracking walnuts in the corner, apparently oblivious to the proceedings around him.

Lord Travers nodded, gave a brief, dry outline of the case before the committee, and then called on Reynaud.

Reynaud took a deep breath, his fingers moving to touch where his knife usually hung by his side before he remembered he’d left it at home. He stood and strode to the front of the room and faced his peers. The faces that looked back at him were mostly old. Would they understand? Did they still have pity?

He took a breath. “My lords, I stand before you and plead for the title my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and his father before him held. I ask you for what is only mine by birth. You have papers attesting to my identity. That, I think, is not at issue.” He paused and looked at the men sitting in judgment of him. Not a one looked particularly sympathetic. “What is at issue is what my opponent intends to claim: that I am mad.”

That caused several lords to frown and put their heads together. Reynaud felt his shoulder blades twitch. The tack he was taking was a risk, but a calculated one.

He let the murmurs die and then lifted his chin. “I am not mad. What I am is an officer of His Majesty’s army, one who has seen perhaps more than his fair share of combat and hardship. If I am mad, then every officer who ever saw battle, who ever came home missing limb or eye, who ever dreamed in the night of blood and war cries, is mad as well. Shame me and you shame every brave man who has fought for this country.”

The voices had grown louder at his assertion, but Reynaud raised his voice to be heard over the murmuring. “Grant me, then, my lords, what is mine and mine alone. The title that belonged to my father. The title that in time will descend to my son. The earldom of Blanchard. My earldom.”

There were frowns and voices raised in argument as he made his way back to his seat. As Reynaud sat down he wondered if he’d just won back his title—or lost it forever.

ALGERNON DOWNEY, THE Duke of Lister, was on the way to the House of Lords, but he paused on the front steps of his town house to give his secretary some additional instructions. “I’ve run out of patience. Tell my aunt that if she cannot keep figures, then she should hire someone literate to do it for her. Until then, I do not intend to give her any further monies this quarter. A few refusals of service from tradesmen may help her to be more frugal with her allowance.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” The secretary made a low bow.

Lister turned to descend his steps to the waiting carriage.

Or at least that was what he intended. Instead he stopped so suddenly that he nearly lost his footing. Waiting for him at the bottom was a tiny, beautiful woman in a bright green frock.

Lister frowned. “Madeleine, what are you doing here?”

The woman thrust out her chest, imperiling the fine silk of her bodice. “What am I doing here?”

Behind him, Lister heard a dry cough. He turned to see his secretary goggling at his mistress.

“Go inside and make sure Her Grace doesn’t take a notion to come out the front door,” Lister ordered.

The secretary looked a bit disappointed, but he bowed and went inside.

Lister started down the steps. “You know better than to visit my family residence, Madeleine. If this is some attempt at blackmail—”

“Blackmail! Oh, I like that! I like that indeed,” Madeleine replied somewhat obscurely. “And what about her?”

Lister followed her pointing finger to find… “Demeter? I don’t understand.”

The blond lady thus addressed cocked a magnificent hip and folded her arms across her ample bosom. “And you think I do? I received this letter”—she waved an elegant-looking missive—“saying you need me at once and please come here, of all places, if I had any affection for you at all.”

Lister drew himself up. His ancestors had fought at the Battle of Hastings, he was the fifth-richest man in England, and he was known for his ill temper. Two of his mistresses appearing at one time on his very doorstep was, of course, disconcerting, but a man of his experience, stature, and—

“And what the blazes is this?” Evelyn, the most strident of his mistresses, exclaimed as she came around the corner. Tall, black-haired, and imposing, she looked at him with the same wild passion that usually turned his loins to iron. “If this is your way of giving me my congé, Algernon, you will regret it, mark my words.”

Lister winced. He hated it when Evelyn called him by his Christian name. He opened his mouth and then wasn’t entirely sure what to say, a thing that had never before happened to him in his life. This experience was ominously close to one of those awful dreams even a man of his stature had once in a while. The nightmares in which one stood up to address the House of Lords and looked down to see that one was wearing only one’s smallclothes. Or the nightmare in which all of one’s mistresses somehow managed to be in the same place at the same time—and at his house, no less.