This Duchess of Mine Read Online Free PDF

better that way. It’s not far, but it’s messy.”
    Elijah followed the footman from one knotty little street to another. There was a holiday spirit inside the barricades. The windows were all open, and people spilled out of the narrow tip-tilting houses, singing songs in a cant dialect that Elijah couldn’t follow, shouting things to each other. They fell silent when they saw him, but not in a unfriendly way.
    For the night, their enemies were not the rich, like himself, but the violent. The riot held everyone’s attention, from the old men sitting outside boasting of foregone days and foregone barricades, to the young women frying up sausages in a lively trade.
    Elijah had a strange, sudden wish that Jemma was with him. His expensive, delicious duchess would enjoy this strange evening. She would love to be following him through these streets.
    The barricade at Bramble Street was a better one than the first. It was intricate but ordered. Men were handing up long pointed objects.
    â€œWhat the devil are those?” Elijah asked.
    â€œSpears,” James said, weaving his way through the excited crowd toward the looming barricade.
    â€œSpears? Spears? ”
    â€œThey’ll have a few guns, but in the dark, spears are a better deterrent. Though no one has attacked a Limehouse barricade in some twenty years. You’d have to be mad to do so,” James said. “Stark mad, so most rioters hove off in other directions. It makes the men around here quite disappointed, really. They keep extending the barricade, in the hope that someone will prove foolish.”
    â€œHow are we going through?”
    The footman grinned, his face wild in the leaping firelight. “You’ll see,” he said.
    It wasn’t until they were in the shadow of the barricade that Elijah realized that there was, in fact, a small trickle of people making their way through a man-shaped hole in the bottom. “They’ll only block the hole when they get word that the riot has started,” James said, worming his way through the people. “Make way!” he shouted. “It’s a duke here. Make way!”
    Elijah felt like a fool, walking through the crowd in his brocade—not to mention his high heels and wig—but that was life as a duke. He’d resigned himself long ago to looking and acting in ways that most men found incomprehensible and that he, in the inner sanctum of his study, often found just as foolish.
    He strode along, the heavy silk of his coat swinging around him, and the people fell back, letting him pass.
    â€œWe’d best make hurry,” James said, almost pushing him through the hole. “They say it’ll start soon.”
    â€œHow on earth do they know?” Elijah asked. He checked his pocket watch. The yacht had taken up anchor. But he couldn’t— wouldn’t —miss his appointment with Jemma.
    â€œThey know,” James said. “There’s the Thames, Your Grace. I’ll just ask one of the mudlarks about a boat. Wait a moment.”
    Some minutes later Elijah sent James back to guard the horses, in the unlikely event that one of the barricades failed, and he climbed into a rowboat owned by a man with the less than inspiring name of Twiddy.
    Even hadn’t he known of the Limehouse blockades, he could have guessed that something was afoot in London. Fires burned all over the city: not huge, uncontained fires, but small glowing ones, the kind that crowds of men gathered around to warm their hands, to talk and gossip.
    Twiddy was a tired-looking fellow in a ripped coat who seemed to have only half his mouth at his disposal, since the other half was frozen by a nasty scar that split his face in two. “You’re wanting the king’s big boat,” he said now, out of the right side of his mouth.
    â€œYes,” Elijah said. “That is correct.”
    â€œRiots’ll start any minute,” the man said. His face