Leslie Lafoy by Her Scandalous Marriage Page B

thing.”
    “Uh-oh,” she said, drinking to keep herself from laughing out loud.
    “Yes. I’ve been informed by a structural engineer that if there should be a strong breeze on the same day that there’s three inches of snow, it will collapse into the neighboring property.”
    How he could make it all so delightfully entertaining . . . “Can it be fixed? Made sound?”
    He held up his hand and shook his head. “The second property left to me is a strand of shoreline on the coast of Cornwall, complete with a twenty-room mansion that overlooks the sea and which, at some point in the past, I assume, must have been quite lovely. I can only imagine its former glory, of course, because the entire west wall of the house has fallen off and allowed persons unknown to cart away all the furnishings.”
    Oh, God. She was going to explode in the most unladylike laughter. “And Geoffrey didn’t have it repaired?”
    “Geoffrey was up to his eyeballs in debt. The cost of building the house in Hyde Park, the expense of keeping Dinky in Paris, and the bills for preventing sixteen people from starving to death in London were the least of his obligations. There was also the duchess. Or more accurately,her expectations, revenge, and the effective use of her dowry to achieve both.”
    “This just gets worse and worse.”
    “Yes, it does. More wine?” he asked, snagging the bottle. “It gets easier to contemplate when you’ve had great quantities of alcohol.”
    “You said revenge,” she reminded him, holding out her glass and letting him fill it. “I gather that the duchess knew about his dalliances.”
    “According to the barrister—who, by the by, wasn’t kind enough to get me drunk before telling me all of this—Brunhilda—”
    “Brunhilda?”
    “Yes, Brunhilda.”
    “You’re joking!” she accused through her laughter.
    “I am not. Apparently she was from Alsace-Lorraine and from a family known for sturdy physiques and their minor claims to Austrian royalty. In any event, her major appeal to Geoffrey was that she came with a huge dowry.”
    “Ah,” she said, lifting her glass in salute. “One of those loveless marriages we were talking about earlier.”
    “Without, after Dinky’s birth, apparently even the practical service exchanges to make it tolerable.”
    “So sad,” she said, drinking. It was wonderful wine. So sweet and smooth and enjoyable. Rather like Drayton Mackenzie in certain respects.
    He snorted. “Lady Ryland was apparently the kind of woman you didn’t cross without paying for it several times over. When Geoffrey’s indiscretions became a public embarrassment, she went to her papa with the tales and, through what was apparently a hideously complicated legal maneuver, he managed to get his little princesscontrol of her dowry. After that, if Geoffrey wanted so much as a new pair of underdrawers, he had to ask her for them.”
    “Didn’t he inherit money of his own?” she asked, fascinated. With the story. Even more so with the man telling it.
    “Aside from being a first-class bounder, Geoffrey was also a drunk, a gambler, and the world’s worst money manager.”
    “Of course.” She shook her head, polished off the wine in her glass, and held out the empty stemware, smiling and saying, “More wine, please.”
    He grinned and poured. “Which brings me to the third property I inherited from him. The country estate. Ryland Castle. I have no idea what sort of physical condition the dwelling itself is in. I’ll be seeing it for the first time when we arrive there tomorrow. I can tell you, however, all about the estate’s financial condition because the barrister felt obliged to bludgeon me with its account ledgers.”
    She drank and he continued to entertain her with travesty, saying, “It has a staff of twenty-five people who, apparently, are also in no danger whatsoever of starvation. The castle sits in the midst of a thousand acres in the famously prosperous and fertile