However, he was now getting things as he wanted and, although the house had certainly acquired a new grace and artistry, he knew when he thought about it that what it lacked was a woman’s touch.
This unfortunately could be achieved only when he had a wife to share the great building with him.
For years he had been determined not to marry, knowing it would interfere with the very amusing life he lived in London and the pleasure he derived from not just one woman but a number.
Now, however, without the prompting of his relatives, he was well aware that it was time he thought for producing children and especially an heir to carry on the succession.
“If you wait much longer, you will be too old to teach your son how to become a game-shot and how to ride,” his grandmother said tartly when last he saw her.
He had not replied and she added,
“It distresses me to think of the Lynchester diamonds shut away in a safe and the pearls doubtless losing their lustre and growing green as they are not worn against a warm skin.”
The Duke had laughed, but he was aware that his grandmother was talking sense.
But when later he thought about it, he had wondered how one set about getting married, when in the Social world in which he reigned as a King in his own right, he seldom, if ever, encountered a young girl.
There were, of course, numbers of debutantes there for the asking, standing beside their chaperones and looking, he thought, dull, gauche and quite beneath his condescension.
At the house parties he gave himself and those he attended, the guests were chosen with particular care and on one primary consideration that they should be entertaining. This, as far as he was concerned, implied two other qualities, they must be alluring and bewitching!
That was certainly what he had found in the sophisticated beauties who looked at him knowingly from under their long eyelashes, pouted their red lips provocatively and made it very clear that they were as willing as he was for a fiery affaire de coeur.
These, the Duke knew, had all the thrill of a sound day’s hunting, a run for his money and the joy of the chase and satisfaction of the kill. It was all most enjoyable and in theory no one was hurt.
This in fact was an assumption that did not always prove true.
The women with whom the Duke engaged himself had a way when he made love to them of not only losing their heads but also their hearts.
He often wondered when he was feeling introspective, why it was when women came to love him so passionately, possessively and demandingly, that invariably after far too short a time he himself became bored and restless.
He wondered why he suddenly ceased to desire them and began to look for a new face and a new interest.
He came to the conclusion that it was because, when he was not making love to them, he began to anticipate exactly what they would say and do, the allurements they would use and the enticements that he had so often met before.
Then all he wanted was to close the door on what had been a short fiery encounter and forget about it.
But in practice it was not as easy as that and women who were in love with him clung, complained and reproached him.
That was what he found boring in the extreme and he sometimes asked himself if it was really worthwhile.
He liked women, he thought, as much as he liked horses and he could not imagine life without either of them.
But he would like also to have children.
Just recently he had been thinking that he would like to teach his son, when he had one, to appreciate the improvements that he had made to Chester Hall.
He would show him how to hunt with the pack of foxhounds of which he was Master and he would certainly start him shooting at an early age so that he would become as outstanding a game-shot as he was himself.
He would also teach him to fish. First the trout in the lake and then he would take him to Scotland where as a boy he would never forget the supreme excitement of catching his first salmon when he had been twelve years of age.
The Duke of Northallerton’s proposition that he should marry his daughter, Caroline, had in a way come like a bombshell. Equally the Duke, when he thought it over, decided it could be a satisfactory solution to the problem that had been perturbing his mind for some time.
He remembered being told that Lady Caroline Allerton was indeed a great beauty and he thought, although he was not sure, that he had noticed her in the hunting field.
Tall, fair and blue-eyed, she would certainly look her best wearing the sapphires, which had been his mother’s favourite set of jewels, and he was sure she would grace the turquoises, which would doubtless match her eyes.
What was more important than anything was that the land called ‘Magnus Croft’ would come back into the possession of the Lynchester estate.
It had always infuriated the Duke that his father should have parted so foolishly with any of their land.
He had only to look at the map in the Estate Office to feel a surge of anger when he saw how the Magnus Croft acres, which dipped right into the estate in the shape of a teapot spout, were coloured green instead of the red that depicted all the rest of his land.
‘Now I am getting things exactly as they should be,’ the Duke told himself.
He wondered what Isobel would think when she heard that he was to be married.
The Countess of Walshingham was his current mistress and he was not yet bored with her.
She was far wittier than the other women he had been involved with in the past years. She made him laugh, which was unusual, even though he was aware that everything she said was at somebody else’s expense.
But the mere fact that she looked so lovely when she was being at her most spiteful and her blue eyes were glinting with venom really added to her charms.
He found too that her fiery response to his love-making was more intense and indeed more demanding than anything he had known for some time.
He knew that he had no wish for the moment to give up the Countess or resist her appeal.
Moreover he told himself that there was no reason now why marriage should interfere with his other interests as long as they were discreetly conducted.
He had every intention of treating his wife with respect and doing nothing to make her embarrassed or even aware that he was unfaithful.
As his wife and a Duchess she was entitled to her place by his side and he knew whether they were at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle or Chester House, he would see that she was received and treated as befitted her position.
‘She shall have no regrets on that score,’ the Duke decided.
The only difference therefore in his behaviour in the future from what it had been in the past would be that his meetings with Isobel or any other woman who took his fancy would have to be far more discreet.
He would have to be clever to deceive the sharp-eyed gossips who were always ready to make trouble, but he was sure that he could outwit them.
The Duke then sat down at his desk to inspect the pile of letters and invitations that his secretary had put there for his perusal.
As he did so, the door opened.
The Duke looked up with a smile.
“Hello, Harry. I am delighted to see you. I am glad you have arrived early before the rest of the party.”
He rose as he spoke and held out his hand and Harry Sheldon, who was one of