Читать книгу To Deceive a Duke - Amanda McCabe - Страница 9

Chapter Two

‘Is it quite satisfactory, your Grace?’ the agent asked, his voice quivering slightly. ‘Truly, it is the finest palazzo to be had in all of Santa Lucia. The views are most exquisite, and it is quite near the cathedral and the village square. And there is a hunting cottage, too, in the hills, if you require it. The baroness is usually very reluctant to leave her furnishings for the tenants, but for you, of course, she is only too happy…’

Only too happy to have an English ducal arse touch her couches? Edward Radcliffe, the Duke of Averton, examined the flaking, worn gilt of the apricot velvet chairs with some amusement. They looked as if the slightest touch would reduce them to a pile of splinters and shredded upholstery. The baroque flourishes of the place, plaster cherubs peering down from the ceilings and faded apricot-coloured silk wallpaper, seemed no better. Chipped and crumbling away, like an abandoned wedding cake.

It could certainly use a thorough cleaning, as well, for the scuffed marble floor was covered with a fine layer of silvery dust. Cobwebs spun from the elaborate frames of old portraits, where the baroness’s exalted Sicilian forebears gazed down at him in disapproval.

Well, they were not the only ones who disapproved, to be sure. Old Italian barons and their long-nosed wives had nothing on one Englishwoman’s contempt-filled emerald eyes.

Edward turned away from them, away from that cool green gaze that haunted him everywhere he went. He leaned his palms on a chipped marble windowsill, peering down at the scene below. The baroness’s palazzo perched at the edge of the hilltop where the village of Santa Lucia gazed out over the valley. The tall, narrow windows, curtained in dusty gold satin and tarnished tassels, stared right at Etna in the distance, to Lake Pergusa and eventually even to the sea.

The palazzo’s small garden, wild and overgrown, seemed to drop off into sheer space. As if an eagle could launch itself into space and go wheeling out over the amphitheatre and into the mist beyond, right from this garden.

The front of the palazzo, on the other hand, sported a much more respectable-looking courtyard, paved and neatly planted with myrtle trees, with tall limestone walls and wrought-iron gates that opened to the narrow street beyond. Its cobblestone length was silent, and seemed rather little travelled, but it did lead right to the village square with its shops and cathedral, its view of the whole village and everyone in it.

Perfect.

‘Tell me,’ Edward said, not turning his gaze from the theatre, ‘where is the house the Chase family rents?’

‘The Chases?’ the agent said, sounding a bit confused. His mind was obviously slow to turn from views and furnishings to the other inhabitants of Santa Lucia. ‘Ah, yes, the family with the daughters! Their home is on the other side of the square, just beyond the cathedral. They are often seen on walks in the evenings.’

So, not far from here. Edward closed his eyes, and it was as if he felt her very presence beside him. The wilful Muse.

‘I will take the palazzo,’ he said, opening his eyes again to the dazzle of the Sicilian sunlight. ‘It is perfect.’

By the next morning, Edward’s battalions of servants had removed the baroness’s dour-painted ancestors and the worst of the gilt furniture and replaced them with choice selections of the Averton antiquities collection. Graceful red-figure amphorae rested on stands under the shocked stares of the plaster angels. A few marble statues took up places in the newly dusted corners, touches of austere elegance amid all the wedding-cake flourishes.

Edward’s own chamber overlooked the front courtyard and the street beyond. The largest bedroom, which was obviously the baroness’s own to judge from the bedhangings draped from a huge family coat-of-arms, looked upon the grand view of garden and hills. But he preferred this smaller space, where he could watch the town and passers-by.

He examined the arrangements as the servants deposited the last of his trunks and crates. Gilded mouldings carved in the shape of roses, wheat sheaves and arrows garlanded the windows and doors, matching the white-and-gold bed and armoire. The blue-and-red carpet was faded and threadbare, as were the coverlets and bedhangings of blue watered silk. It all lacked the medieval grandeur of his Yorkshire castle, the Gothicism of Acropolis House in London. But the mattress was aired, the room spacious enough—and he could see almost the entire town from the window.

Including the edge of the Chase house.

‘It will all do very well,’ he murmured, watching closely as the footmen carried in the last of the antiquities so carefully shipped from London. A statue of Artemis with her bow raised. The famous ‘Alabaster Goddess’. They placed her next to the fireplace, where she looked as if she was about to shoot down a row of simpering porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses on the mantel. Along her base, barely visible in the veined marble, was a scratch mark from a thief’s lever.

Edward traced it lightly with his fingertip, the tiny groove that was the only reminder of that night in the gallery of his London house. Artemis’s cool fierceness always reminded him of Clio. The goddess of the moon, of the hunt—she never let any mortal man stand in the way of what she wanted, what she believed to be right. She never shied away from any danger.

But Artemis was immortal, the favourite child of all-powerful Zeus, who would never let harm come to her. Clio, despite her daring, was all too human. One day her gallant recklessness would surely catch up with her, and she would tumble heedlessly into the danger. Foolish girl.

Edward turned away from Artemis and her bow, and found himself facing a full-length mirror. What a strange vision he was, framed in the gilt flourishes and ribbons of that rented glass! The shoulder-length fall of reddish-blond hair his valet so often hinted he should cut, for the sake of fashion, was tied back. As stark as his black wool coat and white cravat, skewered with a stickpin carved with a cameo head of Medusa. As stark as the sharp cheekbones and square jaw that was the legacy of all the Radcliffes, handed down from some distant Viking ancestor.

Yes, he looked like a true Radcliffe, the heir to the old dukedom, but he was flawed. His nose, thin and straight as a knife blade in the faces of his late father and older brother, was marred by a badly healed break across the bridge. The legacy of a boyish, long-ago brawl with the man who was now Clio’s brother-in-law.

And, a gift from the Muse herself, a jagged scar on his forehead. Healed to a white line now, it was the exact shape of Artemis’s stone elbow.

Edward laid his fingertips lightly on the mark, feeling its slight roughness. Feeling again the fire of her kiss.

Yet he did not let her go then. He could not. It was as if there was a devil inside him, a dark demon that dwelled there, hidden, from the time he was a boy. A part of him that desired Clio Chase no matter what she did—now matter what he did. But he could not let her stand in the way of his work in Santa Lucia.

Edward reached out and tilted the swinging mirror between its hinges until it faced the faded blue wallpaper, and he was hidden from himself. He took off his coat and tossed it over the foot of the bed, rolling up his shirtsleeves to reveal the glint of his ruby-and-emerald rings. His forearms were well muscled and sun-bronzed, the arms of a man who had been working on archeological sites under the southern sun for many of his years. The frilled sleeves hid those signs of un-ducal labour, just as the rings hid the white calluses at the base of his fingers.

It would never do for anyone to see what he was really up to. What the famously reclusive, famously louche ‘Duke of Avarice’ was truly like.

He unlocked the small, iron-bound box on the dressing table. Stacked in there were letters and papers, bags of coins, but beneath was a false bottom, which had stayed neatly in place ever since the box had left England. Edward levered it upwards and drew out two objects. A tiny silver bowl, Grecian to judge by its decorations, second century BC perhaps. It was exquisite, hammered with a pattern of acorns and beechnuts, etched with rough Greek letters spelling out ‘This belongs to the gods’. A warning, and a promise.

Beside it was a scrap of green-and-gold silk, torn along a seam, edged with sparkling green glass beads.

He laid them both carefully aside, the bowl and the silk. They were the symbols of all that brought him to this place. All that brought him again to Clio’s side—even as he fought against that desire.

But fate, it seemed, always had other plans when it came to him and Clio Chase.