And he always yearned for . . .
Well, that was the trouble. He yearned, but could name no object of his yearning. He had a home, Elmwood Manor, in Wiltshire, where he had grown up and that he had inherited with his title from his father. He had also inherited a perfectly competent steward who had been there forever, and therefore he did not need to spend a great deal of time there himself. He had almost sole use of his grandfather’s lavish town house, since his grandparents scarcely came to London any longer and his mother preferred to keep her own establishment. He had fond relatives—paternal grandparents, a maternal grandmother, a mother, three married sisters and their offspring, and some aunts, uncles, and cousins, all on his mother’s side. He had more money than he could decently spend in one lifetime. He had . . . What else did he have?
Well, he had his life. Many did not. Many who would have been his own age, that is, or younger. He was twenty-six and sometimes felt seventy. He enjoyed decent health despite the numerous scars of battle he would carry to the grave, including the one across his face. He had friends. Though that was not strictly accurate. He had numerous friendly acquaintances, but deliberately avoided forming close friendships.
Strangely, he did not usually think of his fellow Survivors as friends. They called themselves the Survivors’ Club, seven of them, six men and one woman. They had all been variously and severely wounded by the Napoleonic Wars, and they had spent a three-year period together at Penderris Hall in Cornwall, country home of George, Duke of Stanbrook, one of their number. George had not been to war himself, but his only son had died in Portugal. The duchess, the boy’s mother, had died a few months later when she threw herself over the high cliffs at the edge of their property. George, as damaged as any of the rest of them, had opened his home as a hospital and then as a convalescent home to a group of officers. And the seven of them had stayed longer than any of the others and had formed a bond that went deeper than family, deeper even than friendship.
It was they, though, his fellow Survivors, who had caused the worse-than-usual restlessness bordering on depression he was feeling this spring. He almost welcomed his grandmother’s letter, then. It suggested, in that way his grandmother had of making an order sound like a request, that he present himself at Manville Court without delay. He had not been there since Christmas, though he wrote dutifully every two weeks, as he did to his other grandmother. His grandfather had not been actively unwell over the holiday, but it had been apparent to Ralph that he had crossed an invisible line between elderliness and frail old age.
He guessed what the summons was all about, of course, even if his grandfather was not actually ill. The duke had no brothers, only one deceased son, and only one live grandson. Short of tracking back a few generations and searching along another, more fruitful branch of the family tree, there was a remarkable dearth of heirs to the dukedom. Ralph was it, in fact. And he had no sons of his own. No daughters either.
And no wife.
His grandmother had no doubt sent for him in order to remind him of that last fact. He could not get sons—not legitimate heirs anyway—if he did not first get a young and fertile wife and then do his duty with her. Her Grace had delivered herself of a speech along those lines over Christmas, and he had promised to begin looking about him for a suitable candidate.
He had not yet got around to keeping that promise. He could use as an excuse, of course, the fact that the Season had only just begun in earnest and that he had had no real opportunity to meet this year’s crop of marriageable young ladies. He had already attended one ball, however, since the hostess was a friend of his mother’s. He had danced with two ladies, one of them married, one not, though the announcement of her betrothal to a gentleman of Ralph’s acquaintance was expected daily. Then, his obligation to his mother fulfilled, he had withdrawn to the card room for the rest of the evening.
The duchess would want to know what progress he was making in his search. She would expect that by now he would at the very least have compiled some sort of list. And making such a list would not be difficult, he had to admit, if he just set his mind to the task, for he was eminently eligible, despite his ruined looks. It was not a thought designed to lift Ralph’s spirits. Duty, however, must be done sooner rather than later, and his grandmother had clearly decided that he needed reminding before the Season advanced any further.
The memory of the precious three weeks he had recently spent with his fellow Survivors at Middlebury Park in Gloucestershire, home of Vincent Hunt, Viscount Darleigh, only added to Ralph’s sense of gloom. All seven of them had been both single and unattached just a little over a year ago during their last annual reunion at Penderris Hall. Without giving the matter any conscious thought, Ralph had assumed they would remain that way forever. As if anything remained the same forever. If he had learned one thing in his twenty-six years, surely it was that everything changed, not always or even usually for the better.
Hugo, Baron Trentham, had been the first to succumb while they were still at Penderris, after he had carried Lady Muir up from the beach, where she had sprained an already lame ankle. They had promptly fallen in love and married a scant few months later. Then Vincent, the youngest of their number, the blind one, had fled one bride chosen by his family and then had narrowly missed being snared by another. He had been prompted by gallantry to offer for the girl who had come to his rescue that second time when she had thwarted the schemer, but ended up being chucked out of her home as a result. They had married a few days after Hugo and in the same church in London. Meanwhile Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—had been staying with his sister in the north of England when he met a widow who was being treated shabbily by her in-laws. He had chivalrously accompanied her when she fled to Wales and had ended up marrying her as well as running her grandfather’s Welsh coal mines and ironworks. Bizarre, that! And now this year, during their reunion in Gloucestershire, Flavian, Viscount Ponsonby, had suddenly and unexpectedly married the widowed sister of the village music teacher and borne her off to London to meet his family.