Unmasking the Duke's Mistress (Gentlemen of Disrepute #1)(60)

He rose abruptly and walked away to look out of the window until he was sure the emotions were schooled from his face. He felt his resolve harden and he knew he would find who this man was and just what dangerous game he was playing.

‘Smith—what did he look like?’ Dominic glanced round at Gemmell.

‘He had dark hair and was well dressed. He carried a cane and was well spoken.’

Just like a hundred other gentlemen in London, thought Dominic.

‘Tall, short? What of his build?’

‘I am afraid I did not notice.’

‘There was nothing else to distinguish him?’ Dominic needed every scrap of information Gemmell could give.

‘Nothing, your Grace.’

‘And what of his carriage?’

‘He travelled on foot. I am sorry I cannot be of more help.’ Gemmell looked worried.

‘Thank you for telling me, Gemmell.’ Dominic sought to reassure the old man.

When the door closed quietly behind Gemmell Dominic rang the bell for his horse to be readied.

If ‘Smith’ had known that Arabella was Miss Noir, there was only one place he could have learned that information.



Mrs Tatton was settling back into life in Amersham just as if she had never been away. Arabella was not.

Dominic had had the cottage refurbished but, aside from that, the little house and its long garden were as Arabella remembered, except that now there was no need to scrimp over coal or count the pennies for food. The generosity of the allowance that Dominic had settled upon her made the misery weigh all the more heavily in her heart.

Dominic. She tried to turn her mind away from consciously thinking of him. She had to survive for Archie’s sake, but if she allowed herself to think of Dominic and of the extent of the hurt she had been forced to deal him, she was not sure she could make it through the rest of this day, never mind the next.

He would come to visit Archie, and Arabella dreaded to see him. But she longed for it too.

She toyed with the food on the dinner plate before her.

‘Eliza Breckenbridge invited all three of us for dinner next week,’ her mother was saying with an excited air. ‘And Meg Brown could scarce believe what a fine boy Archie was.’

The country air had been good for her mother’s lungs, Arabella thought as she glanced across the kitchen table at her. Mrs Tatton’s appetite had improved and Arabella had not seen such a healthy colour in her cheeks in years.

‘Are you even listening to me, Arabella?’

‘Of course, Mama. You were telling me of your friends.’

‘And not one bad word have they said, not one slight, though they must have guessed by now the truth of Archie’s parentage.’ Mrs Tatton added a little more butter to her potatoes before finishing them off. ‘It is good to be back here, Arabella; I had not realised how much I missed the village.’

‘I am glad that you are happy, Mama.’ Arabella forced her lips to curve in the semblance of a smile. But it felt as dead and wooden as the rest of her.

‘Dear Arabella.’ Her mother sighed and reached across the table, taking Arabella’s hand in her own. ‘You are so brave in light of what that man did to you.’

‘Please, Mama. Let us speak of it no more.’ She was not proud of the lie she had told her mother, but she knew Mrs Tatton understood her too well to believe that Arabella had just changed her mind over the marriage. And she did not trust that if she had explained about Mr Smith and his threats her mother would not have gone straight to Dominic and told him of it. And she could not risk that. Not when Dominic’s life and her son’s welfare hung in the balance. Any thaw in relations between Mrs Tatton and Dominic had ceased with Arabella’s lies. In her mother’s book Dominic Furneaux was akin to the very devil himself.

‘Abandoning you for a second time. I knew I should not have trusted him for a minute. Such untruths, and about his own father!’

‘Mama,’ she said firmly, ‘I have asked you not to discuss these matters in front of Archie.’

‘You are right, Arabella.’ Mrs Tatton had the grace to blush. ‘I beg your pardon.’

Arabella turned her attention to Archie, who was sitting listening with a worried expression upon his face. She reached across to Archie’s plate and cut the chicken breast that lay there untouched into small tempting pieces. ‘Now come along, slowcoach. You have not eaten your chicken. And you have not told me how school was today.’ Archie was a new attendee at the village school.

He seemed unusually quiet this evening, and he had eaten little of his dinner.

‘I am not hungry, Mama.’ He kept his face downcast and did not meet her gaze.

‘Archie?’ Arabella looked more closely at her son’s face, placing her fingers on his chin and angling his face in the light to peer at the faint beginnings of a bruise around his eye and a slight swelling upon his lip. ‘Is there something that you wish to tell me?’

‘No, Mama.’

‘Have you been scrapping with the other boys?’

‘The bigger boys said bad things about you, Mama, so I hit them and they hit me back.’

She felt her heart turn over. ‘Well, I thank you for your defence of my good name, Archie.’ Arabella stroked a hand to his hair. ‘But they are just silly boys and they do not know what they are saying. Stay away from the big boys and play with the little boys who are more your age.’