“It isn’t, I suppose, but still—”
“She’s a grown woman, and seems to have sound judgement and plenty of good sense. Yet her own son seemed to think her incapable of choosing for herself what man to marry. Would you truly want a man as overbearing as that paying you his attentions?”
“Well,” Clara began, but Irene gave her no opportunity to answer.
“It’s understandable he would want to know where his mother had gone, but even after I explained that our paper must keep such matters confidential, he still expected me to tell him. No, wait,” she corrected herself at once. “He commanded me to tell him.”
“Then it’s obvious he doesn’t know you,” a long-suffering male voice uttered from the doorway, and both Irene and her sister looked up as their father was wheeled into the drawing room by his valet. “For my part,” he added as Sayers maneuvered the wheeled chair into a place by the settee, “I gave up ordering you about long ago. I recognized it as a futile effort about the time you learned to walk.”
“Very wise of you, Papa,” Irene assured him. “Wouldn’t you agree, Sayers?”
The servant, whose countenance Irene had always likened to Lewis Carroll’s Mock Turtle, bent to secure the brake of the chair before he answered. “I would not presume to say, Miss Deverill,” he told her as he pushed a stool forward and eased his master’s foot onto the padded velvet surface, an action that solicited a growl of pain from the older man. “Sorry, sir.”
Mr. Deverill waved aside apologies. “Just bring me the brandy, then you may go.”
Irene frowned a little, watching him as his servant moved toward the liquor cabinet. “Papa, you should be having tea at teatime, not brandy. And anyway, Doctor Munro has forbidden you the brandy. It makes the gout worse, he said.”
“Nonsense. Munro is a sour old goat, and a teetotaler besides. Of course he’d try to keep me from the brandy. Now then,” he added before she could argue, “would it be the Duke of Torquil who’s ordering our Irene about?”
“The same,” Clara said. “How did you know?”
“How do I hear anything in this house?” Mr. Deverill gestured to the valet approaching with the brandy. “My daughters never tell me anything, that’s certain. Servants, thankfully, feel that the master of the house, even if he’s in his dotage, should be informed when a duke comes to call. Put it there, Sayers,” he added, taking up his filled glass and gesturing for the valet to put the bottle on the table.
“Papa, really,” Irene began, intending to remind her father again of the doctor’s orders, but he cut her off.
“No lectures, my girl. I’m sixty-two years old, and I’ll have my brandy if I want it. Like your duchess, I don’t need my children making my decisions for me.”
“And Papa wonders where I get my stubborn streak?” she said to Clara, earning herself a glare of disapproval from her parent.
“So where is His Grace, then?” Papa asked, glancing around. “Surely you invited him up for tea?”
“Surely I didn’t,” she countered breezily as she settled back in her seat with her teacup and cake.
“Really, Irene, where are your manners?”
“My manners are perfectly acceptable,” she countered, feeling a bit prickly still. “The duke didn’t come to pay a call or have tea.”
“Given our social position, and the fact that I’ve never met the man, I already concluded that much,” her father answered, downed the contents of his glass, and reached for the bottle to refill it. “So why was he here?”
Irene explained, but her father didn’t seem any more enlightened. “So his mother’s gone off with an artist? But why would he come looking for her here? What makes him think you’d know her whereabouts?”
“Because she’s one of Lady Truelove’s correspondents and her letter was in last evening’s edition,” Clara explained. “But Irene sent him off with a flea in his ear, apparently.”
“Lovely.” Papa set aside the bottle and took another hefty swallow of brandy. “Now we’re insulting dukes and turning them out of the house. That will certainly not bode well for my efforts.”
“What efforts are you talking about?” Irene demanded, sitting upright on her seat. “Papa, what are you scheming?”
Her father shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant. “I have been in correspondence with the viscountess, that’s all, hoping to interest her in you and your sister.”
Irene groaned. “Really, Papa! What do you hope to achieve?”
“She might be able to persuade her husband to bury the hatchet. They’re both nearing eighty, you know, and your mother was their only daughter. We might be able to broker a peace.”
“Peace? With Viscount Ellesmere? Not likely. My maternal grandfather, I daresay, would like nothing better than to see our lot at the bottom of the sea.”
“The viscountess seems open to the possibility of a truce, and she thought she might be able to exert some influence with her husband. If so, it could mean a world of difference to both of you. You could perhaps have a season, go to balls, find husbands.”
At twenty-six, Irene knew she was most decidedly on the shelf. Clara, four years younger, might have a bit of time left, but it didn’t much matter. Without dowries, neither of them was likely to find a respectable husband, regardless of how many balls and parties they went to, but her father spoke before she could point that out.
