When You Wish Upon a Duke by Charis Michaels

Four weeks later

“Mother?” whispered Isobel. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take yourself and your watering can outside to the garden. If you please?”

“What?” asked Georgiana Tinker innocently, looking up from a potted geranium.

“You’re distracting my clients,” Isobel sighed, nodding to the baron currently ignoring Samantha as she tried to explain lodging choices in Malta.

“But I’m merely tending to the—”

“You know very well what you’re doing,” said Isobel, “and we need the baron’s undivided attention.”

Despite being nearly fifty years old, not to mention retired, Georgiana Tinker took center stage wherever she went. The lobby of Isobel’s new travel shop was no exception, and Georgiana could sense male attention without even looking up from her reading. Her vocabulary of guiles and wiles ranged from melodious humming, to requests for the loan of handkerchiefs, to exaggerated fanning with a folded broadsheet.

And when she wasn’t distracting fathers and husbands, Georgiana was asserting her opinion of foreign cities. Most well-traveled people agreed that Venice smelled like a sewer in August, but to make a go of the new shop, Isobel needed all of the families to book all of the cities. Even Venice, even in August.

“You’re unsettling the baroness,” said Isobel, thrusting the watering can in her direction. “Out. Go. Take your hat.”

Two weeks had perhaps been too long for her mother’s Hammersmith visit, but she was sending her home on Monday. They need only survive three more days.

“Do forgive me,” said Isobel to the baron, relieving Samantha. “Now where were we?”

Baron Peyton had come to finalize his wife’s itinerary for a late-spring holiday to the island of Malta. The baroness and their two daughters had accompanied him, and the ladies mooned over watercolors of the island while the baron settled the bill.

The baron and baroness were among the first wave of former clients—two dozen in all—who had transferred their patronage to her new shop, Tinker’s Travel. Now a second wave had begun, families who had originally remained with Everland Travel but experienced terrible service or abject confusion since Isobel’s departure.

“I always knew you were the brains of the operation,” the baron had said. “I’d wager Drummond Hooke cannot find the island of Malta on a map.”

Isobel had thanked the baron for entrusting his wife’s journey to Tinker’s Travel and sealed the deal by introducing her own watercolor renderings of the island. She said nothing about the shop on Lumley Street except that it might take some months for Mr. Hooke to set things to rights.

The truth was, Isobel had no idea how Drummond Hooke would carry on without her. She’d had no time to travel to Shropshire to inform him of her resignation in person and had written a letter instead.

“Just to be perfectly clear,” she had written, “it was your proposal that drove me to this, Mr. Hooke. When my job became contingent on marriage to you, I was left with no other choice. Please consider this letter to be notice of my immediate resignation.”

Had it been unfair to give him so little notice? To not walk him through how he might carry on without her? Perhaps. His parents had been lovely to her; was there some debt she could pay to them through their terrible son?

But she’d endeavored to explain the business to him years ago, and he’d shown no interest. It had been like teaching a squirrel to count. Since then, he’d been a constant source of condescension and a fledgling letch.

In response to her letter, Hooke had scrawled out an angry note that seethed with legal doom and slander. She had expected this, but the language and threats had unnerved her. She had new locks installed on the doors and, through an old Lost Boys connection, hired a man from London to serve as her “groundskeeper.” This man tended her new building and garden with casual lack of interest but kept a keen eye out for Drummond Hooke and would render the man quietly ineffective if he dared turn up to cause a stir.

Ultimately, Hooke hadn’t shown his face in Hammersmith. And no subsequent letter followed. Old neighbors on Lumley Street told Isobel that Hooke had reported to his shop with a scrum of office-y looking gentlemen in tow. They had clattered around the shop at odd hours, but there had been very little client traffic. Now Hooke had not been seen for days and an ever-decreasing number of office clerks wafted in and out.

Isobel had gradually allowed worry over Drummond Hooke to ebb away. Partly because she was so very busy those first weeks, and partly because she thought she was about to become . . . well, a duchess. And what threat could Drummond Hooke be when this happened?

When.

If.

Only in her dreams.

What a fool she’d been.

The duke, in fact, had not come.

Not for the first week, or the second, or the third.

Now she’d been back in England for a month. Every day, another puff of hope rose from her chest, stripping off a layer of her heart.

The misery was worse than the seasickness. It was worse than anxiety over the new shop or the fear of Hooke’s retribution. It was far worse than anything she’d ever felt for Peter Boyd.

Her only consolation was that she had been correct about the imposed silence. They’d absolutely done the right thing by keeping their . . . their “betrothal” (had it been an actual betrothal, all things considered?) a secret.

He’d needed the unencumbered time to do whatever a reluctant new duke did to assume the title. His absence meant, in hindsight, that the gaps in their station were too great to allow for what had seemed possible in Iceland.

It was cold, bitter comfort to acknowledge it, and a hundred times she wished she’d put herself and her heart first when his family met the brigantine on the docks.

What if she’d lingered? What if she’d attached herself to the duke’s side and forced him to introduce her? What if she’d walked up, bold as brass, and introduced herself?

Instead, she’d touched Jason’s arm, given him a wink, and slipped away, allowing him to greet his family and step into his new life without the surprise introduction of a heretofore unknown woman from the ship. At the time, she’d been unchaperoned, pale and wan from seasickness, and unable to properly wash her hair for a fortnight. It hadn’t been the time to meet his family, nor had it been what they’d agreed. And so she’d gone, and he’d been swallowed up by his family, and checking in with the Foreign Office, and . . .

And his new life as the Duke of Northumberland.

They hadn’t even said a proper good-bye. She’d been so very ill on the return voyage, far worse than when they’d embarked. And the ship was crawling with the recovered merchants, including Jason’s very demanding cousin.

The Englishmen had shared a collective fascination with “the girl traded to the pirates.” Jason minimized the ordeal by describing her as a colleague whom he’d easily recovered within moments of their cart rolling away.

It was always going to be a bizarre story, but Jason assured Isobel that the injuries and trauma of the merchants would overshadow their memory of her in ropes being thrust into the possession of the pirates. Isobel did her part by staying out of sight, and, in particular, she was careful never to be seen in the company of the duke.

Jason looked in on her often, but she always sent him away. If they were ultimately meant to be together, the last thing she needed was his cousin reporting to relatives that they’d fraternized on the ship.

Not that any of that mattered now, as clearly they were not meant to be together.

The worst part was, she missed him. Terribly, achingly, unrelentingly.

With every swing of her shop door, she looked up, hoping he’d come for her. Every night, she peered out her bedroom window into the dark street, hoping to see a shadowy figure flicking a gold coin.

The hard work of setting up the new shop had been her only saving grace. Every night she read and wrote correspondence until the early-morning hours.

She’d begun to include Samantha in more of everything she did, hoping she might one day require the younger woman to take on a larger role because Isobel would be duchess.

But even while she worked herself into exhaustion, she was hounded by a chiding voice inside her head.

You knew.

You knew.

Why in God’s name would you expect anything different?

Isobel Tinker, a duchess?

The chosen wife of Jason Beckett, the most handsome, clever, strongest, kindest—

He’s a man,she would then say.

Just a man. Like any other man.

And I am a fool.

Of course he’s not coming.

He was never coming.

But at night, when she lay in bed and replayed their time together, she felt the wind on the deck of the brig, the kiss at the river; she remembered his dread of the pirates, his passion in the heated pool. It seemed so real.

And yet.

And yet she awakened every morning alone. She was no one’s duchess; she was nothing to anyone but a friend to Samantha, a travel agent to her clients, and a vexing confusion to her mother.

In truth, she’d invited Georgiana to Hammersmith in part because she’d wanted her mother to bear witness to the moment the duke would come.

How her mother would have been impressed and thrilled by the duke. How happy she would be that Isobel had fallen in love.

Isobel had intended to tell Georgiana everything. In person. No more letters. But then one day turned into the next, and the next, and when no duke appeared, Isobel glossed over that part of the Iceland story. She’d said they’d shared a heated moment on the deck of the brig, but nothing more. She dismissed and deflected every question about him.

Now she would send Georgiana home, and Isobel would be alone in the new building. She would begin to accept that aloneness and the long, terrible reckoning of her shattered heart.

“What of gratuities?” the baron was now asking Isobel, shaking her from another pointless spiral of sadness.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Will the baroness be responsible for tipping staff everywhere she goes?”

Isobel was assuring him that gratuities would be handled by the travel porter when Lady Peyton and her daughters drifted from the watercolors to join the baron at Isobel’s desk.

“Have you begun shopping for your holiday, Lady Peyton?” Isobel asked the baroness.

“Oh yes, and luckily I have my daughters to advise me. I understand it will be rather hot, and I am so very partial to wool. The girls tell me this will never do.”

“I would listen to your daughters, my lady. I wore exclusively cotton, crisp and light, when I was in Malta, even into dinners.”

She winked at the daughters. “But when may we plan a holiday for you girls? We cannot let the young men have all the fun with their grand tours. I’ve planned several holidays for girls your age. Paris. Rome. Hamburg. A journey like this expands your mind as well as your wardrobe.”

The first girl, a round-faced, large-eyed brunette who remined Isobel of an owl, said, “We do not very much care for travel, Miss Tinker.”

The other girl, whose hair was secured with a strange, two-pronged hat that could have passed for rabbit ears, agreed. “Homebodies, the both of us, I’m afraid. We’ve heard the food is very spicy outside of England. We are not at all fond of spicy food.”

“Oh yes,” said Isobel, well aware of a lost cause when she met one. “That can be true.”

She turned back to the baron to show him the itemized gratuities in his wife’s file, but the two girls continued to speak, gossiping with their mother behind the baron. Isobel ignored them until a single name struck her ears like the clang of a bell.

“You don’t mean the Duke of Northumberland?” the baroness was asking.

“Oh yes, Mama,” said the owlish daughter. “Patrice is friendly with the youngest of his sisters, and she told us the situation is rather grave.”

The baron was ticking off service positions, accounting for anyone who might require a tip, but Isobel’s brain had departed their invoice. She stared at the point of his pen as it bobbed up and down along the page. Her rib cage grew tight. She held her breath, straining to hear the girl’s next words.

“It was all of those years outside of England that did it,” the owl went on. “Spicy food is only the beginning; too much travel can take a terrible toll. But you must be very careful, Mama.”

“But what did Patrice say had become of the duke?” asked the baroness.

“Oh, he’s incapacitated, to be sure. Worse than an invalid. He doesn’t get out of bed, and when he does, it’s only to lie facedown on the floor. He barely dresses and grooming is entirely out of the question. He sacked the previous duke’s valet—he’s sacked all of the duke’s personal staff. Such rash behavior as can be expected of someone with too much exposure to other countries . . .”

The rabbit-ish sister said, “You cannot devote years to traipsing around the world and expect to remember what’s what when you return. You see this all the time among families returning from India. Remember Eleanor Stapleton-Block? That kohl around her eyes? And all the scarves?”

“The duke was hardly traipsing about the world,” corrected the baroness. “Northumberland fought in the war and was lauded a hero for his diplomacy and routing of the French. Let us not be disrespectful. Perhaps he’s in his cups. He’s lost two brothers in the last ten years, the poor man.”

The rabbit shook her head. “His sister claims he is not drunk, he’s ‘depressed.’ He hates being duke. Can you imagine, finding a dukedom hateful? Apparently he’s at a loss for how to manage the estate.”

The owlish sister nodded. “The duchess and his sisters waited and waited for his military career to end so he could come home and do his duty, and now this. Patrice says they’re at their wit’s end.”

“Pity,” mused the rabbit, “that giant estate and all of the land. But what good is property if he cannot manage it? They say his tenants are on the verge of revolt. The foundry’s stopped operation, cold and dark for the first time in centuries. Meanwhile, he sleeps all day and rides his horse all night.”

“Pity,” repeated the owl.

Isobel had gone stiff and still behind the counter. Her heart thudded in her ears, the sound of thunder, until it stopped beating altogether. It felt like a suspended bomb waiting to go off.

“Miss Tinker,” the baron was asking, “are you quite alright?”

Isobel stared at him. He spoke words, English words—words she knew—but she comprehended only the conversation behind him.

“Can you post a copy of this bill to our home in Marylebone? I’ll want one for my files and one for my steward.”

“Yes,” said Isobel. She had no idea what she’d agreed to post to Marylebone. She’d stopped listening.

She stood up, her pen still clutched in her hand. “Will you excuse me?” she said.

“But have we finished?” asked the baron. The owl and the rabbit ceased talking and stared at her.

“For the moment,” she said. She dropped the pen. She backed away from her desk.

She’d captivated them now—her odd jerky movements and her blank expression. They watched her to see what she might do next.

Somehow she found the words to say, “Forgive me. I’ve . . . I find myself suddenly indisposed. If you would be so kind as to call again. I will be in touch. The holiday will be lovely, my lady. The trip of a lifetime.”

While the baron and his family stared, Isobel threw open the door to the stairwell and bounded up, already unbuttoning her dress.