Free Lord of Secrets by Alyssa Everett

lied to his uncle Frederick nearly every time they spoke.

Chapter Four
     
    Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
     
    — William Shakespeare
     
    Doing his best not to be too obvious about the direction of his gaze, David watched as Miss Whitwell followed Mrs. Howard from the dining saloon.
    Others were more open in their admiration. Colonel Grandy, the retired army officer sitting on his right, sighed theatrically and turned to Mr. McLeish, the wine merchant. “There goes the only sight worth looking at on this whole blighted ship.”
    “Fetching little thing, isn’t she?”
    “A bit too young for me, I acknowledge,” the colonel said, “but it does no harm to look.”
    David pushed the remains of his dinner about on his plate. A bit too young, indeed. He knew Grandy wasn’t talking about Mrs. Howard, and the man was fifty if he was a day.
    “Lovely girl—sweet as a violet,” McLeish said. “It’s a shame about her father.”
    The colonel gave a sage nod. “A tragedy. One day he’s entertaining the entire company with his stories, and the next he’s food for the fishes. Ah, well. ‘Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow,’ as some wise man once said.”
    Not for the first time, David wished he could be deaf to the conversation around him. It nagged at him, the way the two men were discussing Miss Whitwell and her loss as if they had some proprietary stake in her.
    The colonel shot a wary glance to where young Charles Templeton sat at the other end of the table. He dropped his voice to a confidential murmur. “I feel for the girl. I knew Roger Whitwell—the new Lord Whitwell, that is—at Cambridge. He was sent down for drunkenness in chapel. To speak frankly, I never imagined he would outlive his brother. I’d have wagered that if the drink didn’t finish him off first, some jealous husband or father would put a bullet through his heart.”
    “An unpleasant character, eh?” McLeish said.
    David speared a mushroom with his fork and tried not to look interested.
    “Genial enough in conversation, but a very loose fish. He and the girl’s father had a falling-out, years ago. If the gossip I heard is true, Roger Whitwell made a bit too free with his brother’s wife.”
    McLeish’s square, weather-beaten face registered shock. “You mean before he married her, I hope.”
    “No, after. She was a beauty—made her come-out the same year as my sister Emmy, and cast all the girls that year into the shade. Whitwell married her and brought her home, where his brother was cooling his heels, owing to that chapel business. The rumor was, Roger Whitwell cornered the poor girl on a staircase and tried to have his way with her.”
    “Good Lord!”
    “Whitwell threw him out, naturally, but that wasn’t the end of his wildness. He married a Covent Garden actress, and now he runs with Lord Allen’s set. He’s made himself unwelcome under more than one roof. Not five miles from my house in Hertfordshire, he got a sixteen-year-old chambermaid with child.”
    David’s mouth went so dry he could hardly choke down the piece of chicken he was chewing. Miss Whitwell had insisted the new Lord Whitwell was not that bad. Instead the man was even worse than David had imagined.
    Thank God she’d mentioned taking a position as paid companion to Mrs. Howard. It had sounded like a joyless proposition, but now...
    David reached for his wineglass, his fingers curling tightly about the stem. If Roger Whitwell had attempted to violate his brother’s wife—his own sister-in-law—what would prevent him from taking similar liberties with his niece, a strikingly lovely girl still in the first blush of youth? What possible defense could Miss Whitwell have against such a man? Alone and trusting, she’d be at the mercy of—
    But she wasn’t going to be. She was going to work for Mrs. Howard. Besides, David had no place in Miss Whitwell’s life, no authority to