A Duke in Danger Read Online Free PDF Page A

sister.
    But it had been explained to him that the Duchess had unfortunately lost two other children prematurely in the intervening time.
    It had therefore been a triumph for the Doctors when the Duchess’s daughter had survived. Alvina must by this time, the Duke calculated, be nineteen or twenty.
    He wondered what she would look like. The Duke had been a handsome man, and he knew that the Duchess had been acclaimed as being outstandingly beautiful.
    He actually found it hard to remember Alvina’s face, because on that occasion he had been so amazed by the magnificence of the Castle and the extravagance of the festivities which celebrated Richard’s coming-of-age.
    Never, even in his later travels, had he seen better or more spectacular fireworks, and he could remember the fantastic decorations in the Banquetting-Hall, which had been filled with distinguished guests.
    The ladies had glittered like Christmas-trees with diamonds on their heads, their necks, and their wrists, and the gentlemen, all wearing their decorations, were not eclipsed.
    Because the Duke of Harlington was of such importance, there were several guests of Royal rank present, besides nearly all the Ambassadors to the Court of St. James.
    He remembered thinking that their gold-braided uniforms, jewelled decorations, and be-ribboned chests out-glittered even the splendour of a full Regimental dress like his own.
    Richard had made an excellent speech that night but now lay buried on the battlefield of Waterloo, while he, a distant cousin, was to take his place at the Castle as the fifth Duke of Harlington.
    Then as he drove on, having left the suburbs of London far behind, and now moving through the open country, the Duke’s thoughts returned to Lady Alvina.
    Once again he squared his chin and tightened his lips.
    “How could she have dared to pawn anything so priceless as the Germain bowl?” he asked himself.
    When the pawn-broker had mentioned that among the other things in his possession there were several miniatures, the Duke had stiffened.
    The Harlington collection of miniatures was the most famous in the country.
    Some of them dated back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and almost every Harling who had owned the Castle had added a miniature of himself and his wife.
    The Duke recalled that they decorated the walls of the Blue Drawing-Room, and it had given him intense satisfaction, when he was in Paris, Vienna, and Rome, to realise that none of these three cities had miniatures that could rival the Harlington collection.
    He had never expected to possess any one of them or even to have the pleasure of seeing them frequently. But just as the Harlings always believed that the Castle belonged to them as a family, so they thought of its contents.
    On his way back from France, the Duke had known that the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else was to see the Castle, live in it, and make it the focal point of his new life.
    “Harlington Castle,” he repeated to himself, and knew that the name meant more than could possibly be expressed in words.
    The way in which his father had talked of the Castle was one of his first boyhood memories, and it had always seemed to him to be inhabited by Knights.
    When he had first read the tale of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, he had pictured them living in a Castle that was exactly like the one to which he belonged by name and birth.
    Later, it coloured every fairy-tale he read and every history-book he opened.
    When he was taught about the Crusades, he imagined very vividly the Knights setting out to attack the Saracens from Harlington Castle.
    Queen Elizabeth had stayed there on her travels round England, and she therefore had a special place in his mind because she had feasted and slept as the guest of one of his ancestors.
    So it went on through his hist o ry-lessons, until, when in real life he was fighting against the domination of Napoleon, he was fighting for England, but especially