Untamed Read Online Free PDF Page B

it would never be light again.
    ‘Champagne,’ he said, and grinned at Crispin, who sat across from him. ‘We need champagne.’
    The four other boys who followed him everywhere – who had insisted on calling themselves the Duke’s Dandies since his father’s death – draped themselves over sofa backs and on the floor. ‘Champagne,’ Babylon said, his voice gruff with drink. ‘Blistering – blaster – good idea. Never been so nervous in my life. Those footmen were demmed serious about keeping the Duke in their sights.’
    Hopwell reached out a lazy foot and kicked whatever part of Babylon was easiest to reach. ‘I swear you told everyone who would listen, That’s him, don’t you know, the Duke of Darlington. You’re to call him Your Grace, don’t you know .’ The imitation was cruel but accurate.
    Crispin hadn’t looked away from Darlington. His eyes crinkled up, and he laughed. ‘How did I do? Do I not make a very fine duke?’
    Darlington lurched forward and took Crispin’s face firmly between his hands. The boy looked so like him, yet so young and unspoiled, that some days it broke his heart. ‘You were incandescent,’ he said.
    Crispin flushed, his eyes going brighter still. ‘I told you I would not let you down.’
    Of course you wouldn’t, thought Darlington. Because all that love and loyalty you think you feel for me, I have lodged in your breast so that I may ask such a thing of you, and you will not let me down.
    He made his smile wider. An obliterating kind of a smile. ‘A lady told me tonight that the Duke of Darlington is nothing more than a hairstyle, some tall collars and a cravat that other men envy. I’m afraid we only proved her right, passing you off so easily as me.’
    How long it seemed since those words had been spoken, yet they stung him still.
    Crispin laughed. ‘How clever we are.’
    He kissed Crispin lightly and let him go. ‘I am going to make a pamphlet of her words for the discontented bourgeoisie. Let them read something entertaining while they eat their cake. Can the bourgeoisie read? Never mind. Someone fetch me paper and a pencil!’
    He began composing a scathing and pithy account of the Duke of Darlington, and the Dandies shouted out their own suggestions. It was very important it be pithy. He wondered, after he stressed this point for the third time, just how drunk he was. The words scrawled in pencil on the back of an old concert bill seemed curiously detached, as though his hand were following some simple, happy direction he wasn’t privy to.
    His butler entered to preside over the footmen pouring champagne. He bore a letter on a salver, addressed in the Prime Minister’s hand. One golden sip of champagne seemed to scour Darlington clean, and he had to remind himself not to drain the glass. He opened the letter and smiled.
    The Most Honourable Duke of Darlington; Rumour tells me you had a grand time at the Marmotte ball, and behaved yourself perfectly. On quite another note, I have drafted the bill for Lord Marmotte’s divorce from his wife, and need only his petition to proceed. Rest. Eat. Please try to at least resist doing anything foolish. It was signed merely Liverpool, under which was scrawled, Coffee does not count as food.
    He looked up at the Dandies, who shouted the night’s events to each other, already drafting the anecdotes they would tell later. He had handpicked them. They were boys no one thought to pay mind to – boys one could sometimes be excused for mistaking for imbeciles.
    When they spoke like this, at the end of a long night, Darlington sifted their conversation for the frighteningly acute things they observed about the people who dismissed them. And sometimes the truths they betrayed about their own families.
    He had seduced them one by one with his attention over the past two years, and now he wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to get rid of them again without inflicting considerable harm.
    ‘Duke,’ said Crispin beneath