Page 55 of The Dueling Duchess

“I’ll ask him. I thought you were going to hire an apprentice?”

“I have potential candidates coming, starting on Monday.”

Cecile was not looking forward to the process of interviewing her replacement. But if she was really going to have a business that supported her into her dotage, she needed to find an able assistant, sooner rather than later.

Chapter 11

“This is an irrevocable step, Guy. Are you sure?” Sin asked.

Guy met the other man’s concerned gaze. “I know selling an estate that has been in the family for generations is irrevocable. But it is all I have to sell now that I, personally, am no longer of any value.” He gave a bitter laugh. “I’m exhausted, Sin. I feel as if my entire life has gone toward fixing a mess that simply will not be fixed.”

He gazed down at the glass of whiskey—his second since coming to Sin’s house after signing the papers. “Selling Darlington Park is the only thing that will allow me to take care of both Claudia and Diana. I know a generous dowry won’t ensure that they get decent husbands, but at least they won’t have to settle. Besides, I think Claudia just wants to marry Donald Hemmings,” he added.

Hemmings was a gentleman farmer of respectable means. Unfortunately, Guy’s mother didn’t think he was good enough for a duke’s sister. She couldn’t say that now.

“Hemmings is a good man,” Sin murmured.

Because Sin’s property ran with Darlington Park on the south-west side, they knew all the same people.

“As for Diana?” Guy went on. “Well, she told me yesterday that she never wants to get married. She says she wants to study rocks.”

“Your little sister is a force of nature,” Sin said.

“She is indeed,” Guy agreed proudly. Diana was his favorite sibling, even though they were the farthest apart in years.

“This money will allow her to study rocks or any other damned things she wants,” Guy said, and then threw back the rest of his drink and didn’t protest when Sin stood and poured him another.

“If you had to sell to anyone, you made a good choice,” Sin said, breaking the brittle tension that Guy knew was his fault. “Baron Westfield is a good man and will take care of Darlington Park.”

Guy knew that. Westfield was one of the new crop of peers to come out of the War. Men who’d served their country with money and ingenuity and received a title—without any land to go with it—from Prinny as thanks.

“He is a good man,” Guy agreed. “And he was very kind about the terms he offered.”

Westfield had been embarrassingly kind. Guy had looked into the older man’s face and known that he understood the pain of parting with the property.

“He offered to keep Diana’s three hunters in the Darlington stables and encouraged the girls and my mother to make use of the library and anything else they wanted. He said he will not reside there full time—this is at least the fourth estate he’s acquired in the past few years—and he told me that Mother should avail herself of the property as if it was still hers.”

Guy’s mother, he’d been ashamed to see, had treated the gregarious industrialist as if he were something she’d brought in on her shoe.

Westfield was a pleasant older man—a bachelor—and he’d clearly found Guy’s mother’s chilly behavior amusing. In fact, Guy suspected Westfield was rather taken with her.

He laughed at the thought of the rough-and-tumble ironmonger breaking through the foot-thick ice barrier his mother had always kept around herself. It didn’t matter that her background was far closer to Westfield’s than it had been to Guy’s father. She was as starchy as any of the Almack’s patronesses when it came to matters of lineage.

“The Dower House is a nice little property,” Sin said, clearly trying to cheer him up.

“It is very pleasant,” Guy agreed.

Especially since he’d poured so much of Darlington Park’s precious revenue into it since his father’s death. Even though his mother had lived with him at Fairhurst, Guy had known that one day, when he married, she’d need to move into the Dower House. She was simply too strong a personality to live in the same house with his wife.

If he’d married a woman with any will, they would have clashed. And if he’d married a sweet, gentle thing, his mother would have rolled over her like a mail coach.

Guy hadn’t been well-enough acquainted with Miss Helena Carter to know if she’d been in the first or second category.

“So, what are you going to do, Guy?” Sin asked quietly.

He glanced up from his thoughts and met his friend’s apprehensive look, suddenly feeling guilty for visiting with such depressing tidings.

“I will land on my feet, Sin—you know I always do. But enough about my issues—they are over now, and it is time to move past them. How are things with you and Marianne?”