The Duke Goes Down (The Duke Hunt #1) by Sophie Jordan

It had not been his doing. None of it. He had led a life of blissful ignorance, unaware of the truth waiting to materialize.

Truth always had a way of doing that, of revealing itself and illuminating the darkest, hidden corners. It could not stay buried forever.

The wrongdoing had belonged to his parents alone, but his father was dead now and unable to answer for his deception. That left only his mother.

When all had come to light, she had behaved as though she were the victim of a hoax. A cruel hoax perpetrated against her.

“It was your father’s idea,” she had wept when Perry demanded an explanation from her.

Fortunately she’d been in Town for the season and Perry had not needed to travel far to arrive at her house in Mayfair to confront her. She was just rousing herself at noon and taking her breakfast in her private rooms, comfortably attired in her dressing robe with her hair hidden inside a turban—as she had done ever since he could remember. As children, he and his sister knew not to bother his mother until late in the afternoon.

“He said the title belonged to his son, no matter if you were born before we were wed. He was off on the Continent when I learned I was increasing.” She sniffed and dabbed at her nose with a lacy handkerchief. “He wanted a grand tour before he settled down.”

“What for?” Perry had snorted, pacing a hard line in her chamber. “It seems he was having quite a bit of fun sowing his oats right here in England. Why did he need to go abroad for his diversions?”

“Peregrine.” His mother lifted her tear-stained face from her handkerchief to glare at him reproachfully. “Don’t you dare cast judgment on me. It’s not as though you have led a saintly existence. Have you?”

His mother was the daughter of a marquis. She came from an old and venerable family. She had always known she would marry the Duke of Penning and one day become the Duchess of Penning. That had been taught to her alongside her letters and embroidery. He supposed this certainty might have accounted for her willingness to prematurely consummate her union. She must have felt her future was assured.

Perry did not know what his mother or father could have been thinking. Clearly they weren’t using good judgment. He could only guess that they had been afflicted with youthful short-sightedness and functioning from the waist down . . . but he would rather not contemplate his mother and late father together in so intimate a fashion. It was all too much. He was already battling nausea over finding himself in this grim situation.

“I never lied to the world,” he had told his mother in the face of her censure and accusation. “I never stole a life that wasn’t mine.”

I just lived that stolen life.

The color had burned hot in her cheeks. “Once I sent word to your father, he returned as soon as he could . . . as soon as he was located.” A grimace crossed her face. “It just took some time for word to reach him.” She paused and tilted her head. “I believe he was found in the Netherlands.” She shrugged as though that were of no account now. “Alas he did not get here in time. You were born as he was en route home.”

“A great inconvenience, that,” Perry said with all the bitterness one might feel in such circumstances. Not that he imagined many people ever found themselves so similarly devastated. His situation was wholly unique.

“We married as soon as he returned.”

“Little good that does me now.”

“We shall contest this!” His mother struck a fist on the surface of the table, her eyes bright with the impulse to fight.

He’d grimaced, recalling the grim visages of the crown’s agents in his drawing room, armed with documentation that verified the true date of his birth was before his parents’ wedding, an event that took place at a small church in Yorkshire. That alone served as a flag.

Why had his mother not been wed in grand style in St. Paul’s Cathedral in front of hundreds of members of the ton as her sister had done? As her mother had done? As all the previous Dukes of Penning had done?

A small wedding at a remote shire in Yorkshire was certainly not in keeping with tradition or with his mother’s enduring need for spectacle and admiration.

His parents had been married in near seclusion and without pomp because she had been hiding her newborn son from the world.

“You want to contest it?” He shook his head. “Why? Are they mistaken? Was I born after your marriage? Am I legitimate? Am I not a bastard? That is the only point that matters here.”

She glared at him in mute frustration, her lips pressing together mutinously. “It is not right.”

“And yet it is indisputable.”

They would not take on the laws of primogeniture and win. Surely she knew that. Certainly she was not so arrogant to believe she was an exception to long-standing tradition and the rules that governed their land?

She stabbed a finger toward him. “You are not the only one affected here, Peregrine.”

He blinked at her sudden attack on him.

“Oh, the shame.” She pressed her hands to her flaming cheeks. “Thank Providence your sister is already married to Geston and can weather this.”

“Indeed,” he’d said wryly. “Thank Providence for Thirza’s good fortune.”

At least one of his parents’ offspring would be untouched by the day’s revelations. But then Thirza was the legitimate one. She had nothing to fear other than the barest tangential shame. Her marriage to the Earl of Geston would spare her the worst of the damage. Thirza’s mother-in-law was a great friend of the queen, after all.