Danger To The Duke

CHAPTER ONE - 1885-1

CHAPTER ONE

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1885As the P&O liner moved out the harbour of Alexandria, Major Michael Moore breathed a sigh of relief.

India was now far behind him and very much to his surprise he was still alive.

It was the Viceroy, the Marquis of Dufferin, who had said to him,

“I am deeply grateful to you, Moore, for saving my life and of a great number of British troops. At the same time you are now a marked man and the sooner you return home for a long holiday the better.”

Michael Moore realised that what the Viceroy was saying was common sense.

He had been intimately involved in one of the most dangerous and frightening undercover operations he had ever known.

When he came to India as a Subaltern, he had been attracted, as so many young Officers, by what was known as the ‘Great Game’, which had started at the beginning of the century when the Russian troops had begun their Southward advance through the Caucasus.

Having crushed the Caucasian tribes after a long and bitter resistance, the Russians next switched their gaze Eastwards.

In a vast area of desert and mountains lay the Muslim Khanates of Khiva and Bokhara and it was only as Russian victories over these small tribes followed one after another monotonously that fears for the safety of India were beginning to be felt.

One by one the ancient caravan towns fell to the hard riding Russian Cossacks, who were moving closer and closer to India’s ill-guarded frontiers.

It was then that the British military became involved in what was whispered about as ‘the Great Game’.

They risked their lives over and over again.

They filled in blanks on the map, reported on Russian movements and tried to win the allegiance of suspicious Khans. Many failed to return from the treacherous North- West and died bravely in appalling circumstances.

As the threat from Russia increased, so did the numbers of participants in the Great Game. Most were professionals, Indian Army Officers or political agents and they were sent by their superiors in Calcutta to gather intelligence by any means they could muster.

Others were amateurs, sometimes travellers of independent means and they were surprisingly successful in what one of the Czar’s Ministers once called ‘this tournament of shadows’.

In his years of service in India Michael Moore had become a professional. He was trusted by the Viceroy and the Chiefs of the Army to take on assignments that were thought to be too perilous for anyone else and he had been amazingly successful.

This was principally because when he first arrived in India he did not prize his own life very highly.

He had actually journeyed to India to escape from England and a broken heart.

Michael Moore was the son of Lord Charles Moore, the third son of the Fourth Duke of Grangemoore.

The Duke was an extremely affluent and important grandee who had expelled his son Charles from the bosom of his family and Michael had in fact never met his grandfather.

Lord Charles had rebelled against the ancient tradition that his father should choose for him the woman he should marry.

Both his elder brothers had meekly obeyed their father’s wishes and when they were twenty-one, the Duke had arranged their marriages. He chose blue-blooded young women whose family in his opinion was the equal of his own.

Lord Charles had seen his eldest brother married to an exceedingly dull and rather plain girl, the daughter of a neighbouring Duke who was a friend of his father.

For his second son the Duke had chosen a Bulgarian Princess, whose father was anxious to find some excuse for flying the Union Jack in his small and not well protected country.

In Lord Charles’s opinion both his brothers were, if not unhappy in their marriages, they were excessively bored by their wives and took the opportunity, whenever it was possible, of being unfaithful to them.

Lord Charles was an idealist and resembled his mother rather than his father.

Just before his twenty-first birthday he was told that it was time for him to be married to a blue blood acceptable to his father and he immediately travelled to London to look for a wife with whom he had some chance of finding happiness.

By what seemed to him a miracle he discovered her.

It happened only a week after he had begun to do the rounds of the Mayfair ballrooms. As he was the son of a Duke and his parents were well known in the Social world he had been heartily welcomed by mothers with marriageable daughters, although as a third son he had little chance of ever inheriting the title.

At a dinner party preceding a ball which was being thrown by one of the most important Social hostesses in London, Lord Charles sat next to a young girl, who was very lovely but seemed extremely shy.

After he had talked to her for a little while he discovered she had been asked only at the last moment to take the place of a young woman who had been taken ill.

“I am only the Vicar’s daughter,” she had told him, “from the village where our hostess has a large and impressive house and I am sometimes lucky enough to be invited.”

Because she was so pretty and at the same time so honest about herself, Lord Charles had been intrigued.

They had danced together and by the end of the evening he was in love. It was at first sight, something which he had never believed in before.

Yet it had now actually happened to him.

A week later he asked the Vicar’s daughter, whose name was Sylvia, to marry him.

Because he was very good-looking and extremely charming she was already head-over-heels in love with him.

Lord Charles returned to the country with the information that, as his father wished, he would be married by the time he was twenty-one.

The Duke, however, was not only angry, but appalled at the idea of his son making such a bad marriage.

He raged at Charles and told him that he had already started negotiations for him to marry the daughter of a Marquis and forbade him ever to see Sylvia again.

Lord Charles had solved the whole problem quite simply by running away with Sylvia and they were married secretly by her father.

The Duke did not learn of their marriage until they had been on their honeymoon for over a week.

When he did know what had happened, he was incensed, in fact he was so infuriated that his family were afraid he might have a stroke!

It was the first time that any of his children had ever stood up to him and he could hardly believe it had happened.

However, as the marriage had already taken place, he could do nothing about it, but the Duke immediately cut Lord Charles out of his will.

He told him he was no longer welcome in his own home and refused to have his name mentioned in his presence.

It was fortunate that Lord Charles had a small amount of money left to him by his Godmother and it was enough for him to buy a small house with some land not far from where Sylvia’s father lived.

It was also fortunate that what he was really good at was riding and he loved horses.

He found after a few experiments that he could buy a young horse cheap, break it in, train it and sell it for at least three or four times the price he had paid in the first place.

By the time Michael grew up his father was a well known and respected horse-dealer not only in his own County but in the whole neighbourhood. Anyone who wanted to purchase a good hunter came to see Lord Charles and seldom left unsatisfied.

It meant that, with no help at all from his ducal grandfather, Michael was sent to Eton and Oxford to be educated.

He was ambitious to join the Army and he was deciding which Regiment he would choose, when, just as his father had, he fell in love at first sight.

By way of contrast it was not with an unimportant Vicar’s daughter.

The Earl of Wargrave was giving one of the most important balls of the Season for his daughter, who was already acknowledged as one of the great beauties of London.

Because Michael was so handsome, Lady Felicity had danced with him several times and she had persuaded her mother to invite him to all the parties which were being given in her honour.

Every time he saw her, Michael fell more and more in love.

She was not only very beautiful but also intelligent. They laughed at the same jokes and enjoyed many interests in common.

This convinced Michael that they were admirably suited to each other.

When he kissed Felicity for the first time he thought he had reached Heaven itself and he asked her how soon they could be married.

“I shall have to think about it,” Felicity had said. “It would be a mistake to do things in too much of a hurry.”

“I am in a hurry because I want you with me,” Michael had urged her. “I love you, my darling Felicity, and I know you love me.”

“I love being with you, Michael,” she replied, “and when we dance together I know everyone is looking at us because you are so handsome – ”

“And you are so beautiful,” Michael finished for her.

They had in fact laughed at their own social success.

Michael made up his mind as to which Regiment he would join as soon as he was married.

He was not particularly perturbed as to how they would manage as he knew Felicity had a little money of her own and his father had always been very generous. He was what might be called comfortably well off.

‘We will manage,’ Michael told himself, ‘one way or another and we will be very happy.’

A week later the blow fell.

He received a message from Felicity to say she wanted to see him so he went to her father’s house in Park Lane which he knew well by this time.

He was automatically taken by the butler to the small sitting room on the first floor where they had been alone so often. Felicity’s mother had apparently not minded such unconventional behaviour.

Felicity was waiting for him, looking, he thought, even lovelier than usual.

As the butler closed the door behind him, he walked towards her and took her in his arms. He would have kissed her, but she put up her hand and laid it against his lips.

“I have something to tell you, Michael,” she began.

“I want to kiss you,” he insisted.

“You must hear first what I have to say.”

“Very well,” he smiled, “but hurry.”

To his surprise Felicity moved from his arms and walked across the room to the fireplace, where she stood looking down at the fire with her back to him.

“Whatever is the matter?” asked Michael. “What has happened?”

“I do not know how to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

There was a long pause and then in a voice he could hardly hear, Felicity murmured,

“I am going to marry Simon Harrington.”

Michael stiffened.

He could not believe what he had just heard – there must be some mistake.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I am sorry, Michael, and I know it will upset you, but Mama and Papa are delighted, as you can imagine, and although I love you we could never have managed with so little money.”

“We would have been together – ”

His voice did not sound like his own and he still could not believe what she was saying.

Then as she did not reply, he demanded,

“Why, why are you doing this?”

Even as he spoke he knew the answer. Simon was the eldest son of the Duke of Cambria and there was no need for Felicity to explain further.

There was in fact no need for either of them to say anything to each other.

For a moment Michael thought of pleading with her, telling her how much he loved her and that he knew she loved him. Then his common sense told him it was useless.

Simon could offer her a title and he was well aware that was what every young woman in the Beau Monde craved for.