Desperate Duchesses (2 page)

But the plump little pigeon of a man dug in his heels, squared his shoulders and retorted, “Muse upon my comments at your leisure, or woe betide your eternal soul!”

Everyone in the immediate vicinity stopped dancing, grasping that a more interesting performance had begun.

The marquess did not disappoint them. “Mrs. Grope is a lovely woman, kind enough to accept my adoration,” Roberta’s father roared, loud enough so that no one in the room could miss a word. “She is no more a trol op than is my own daughter, the treasure of my house!”

Predictably, the crowd turned as one to examine the signs of trol opdom, the first interest shown Roberta al evening. With a gasp, she fled back to the ladies’ retiring room.

Within a half hour, Roberta made several important decisions. The first was that she’d had enough humiliation. She wanted a husband who would never, under any circumstances, make a public display of himself or those around him. And he should know nothing of poetry. Second, her only chance of finding that husband was to make her way to London without her father or Mrs. Grope. She would go there, pick an appropriate gentleman and arrange to marry him. Somehow.

She returned to her seat in the corner with renewed interest and began surveying the company for the appropriate characteristics.

“Who is that gentleman?” she asked a passing footman, who had given her a few pitying glances during the evening.

He said, “Which one, Miss?” He had a nice smile and looked as if his wig itched.

“The man in the green coat.” To cal it green was faint praise: it was a pale, pale green, embroidered with black flowers. It was the most exquisite garment she had ever seen. The man was tal and moved with the careless grace of an athlete. He wore no wig, unlike the other perspiring gentlemen pacing through the dance. His hair was a rumpled black, shot with two or three bril iant streaks of white, and tied at his neck with a pale green ribbon. He was a dangerous mixture of carelessness and supreme elegance.

The footman handed her a glass in order to disguise the fact they were speaking. “That’s His Grace, the Duke of Vil iers.

He plays chess. Hadn’t you heard of him then?”

She shook her head and took the glass.

“They do say he’s the best for chess in England,” the footman said. He leaned a bit closer and said, eyes dancing, “Lady Cholmondelay thinks he’s the best at sport, if you’l forgive my presumption.”

A snort of laughter escaped Roberta’s mouth before she could stop herself.

“I’ve watched you this eve,” he said. “Tapping your foot. We’ve our own bal below stairs. And it seems no one knows you here. Why don’t you come back there and dance a round with me?”

“I couldn’t! Someone would—” She looked around. The room was crowded with laughing, dancing peers. No one had paid any attention to her, or even spoken to her in over an hour. Her papa had wandered off again with Mrs. Grope, content to think that she was “hunting prey,” as he put it in the carriage.

“Below stairs, they won’t know you’re a lady,” the footman said, “not in that dress, miss. They’l think you’re a lady’s maid.

At least that way you can have a dance!”

“Al right,” she whispered.

For the first time al evening, young men bowed before her. She invented an irascible mistress and had great fun describing her tribulations dressing her. She danced twice with “her” footman and separately with three more. Final y, she realized that there was a remote possibility that her father would miss her, and she headed back to the bal .

Then she realized there was also the possibility that he would have forgotten about her and left for the inn.

She ran down the corridor, slammed open the baize door that marked the servants’ quarters—and knocked over the Duke of Vil iers.

He stared at her from the ground, with eyes as cold as spring rainfal . Then he said without stirring, in a husky, drawling voice that made her shiver al over, “You must tel the butler to train you in proper behavior.”

She blushed and dropped a curtsy, dazed by the pure raw masculinity of him, by his hol owed cheeks and jaded look. He was everything that her father was not. There wasn’t an ounce of sentiment in him. A man like that would never embarrass himself.

Life with her father had taught her to be blunt about her own emotions, or risk having them dissected by a poet. So she knew instantly what it was she felt:
lust.
Her father’s poetry on the subject filtered through her mind, confirming her sense.

He stood and then tipped up her chin. “An astonishing beauty to find in such a dim squirrel’s hole as the servants’

quarters.”

Roberta felt a thril of triumph. Apparently
he
didn’t think that she had a beetle brow or a humped back. The lust was mutual. “Ah—” she said, trying to think what to say other than a blunt proposal.

“Red hair,” he said, rather dreamily. “Extraordinary high arches of eyebrows, slightly tilted eyes. A deep ruby for a lower lip. I could paint you in water colors.”

His catalog raised Roberta’s hackles a little; she felt like a horse he was considering for purchase. “I should prefer not to look blurry; could you not manage oils?” she asked.

He raised an eyebrow. “No maid’s apron, and the voice of a lady. I fear I misjudged your station.”

“As a matter of fact, I am rejoining my family in the bal room.”

His eyes skittered over the plain laced front of her gown, with its misshapen pleats that looked as if she had fashioned them herself.

He dropped his hand. “That makes you altogether more delectable and forbidden fare, an impoverished noble-woman. I would have you without delay if you had but a few pennies to your name, my dear, but even I have a few paltry morals. Foibles, real y.”

“You assume a great deal,” she said. She meant that he was assuming she was poor, although the supposition was fair enough, given her clothing. But he jumped to the more obvious meaning.

“’Tis true you might not have me. Though I’l tel you the secret to my success with women, and I won’t charge you ha’pence since you haven’t an extra one to your purse.”

She waited, cataloging the sheen of his coat and the rumpled perfection of his hair.

“I don’t real y give a damn whether I have you or not.”

“You shan’t have me,” she said, stung. “Because I feel precisely the same way about you.”

“In that case, I wil kiss your fingertips and retire.”

As he made a leg before her, she watched the skirts of his coat fal into perfect pleats. Not for nothing was she a As he made a leg before her, she watched the skirts of his coat fal into perfect pleats. Not for nothing was she a wordsmith’s daughter. Pale green wasn’t descriptive enough; the silk taffeta of his coat was celadon, the green of new leaves.

And its black embroidery, on close inspection, was mulberry-colored.

It was an exquisite combination. Enough to change her mind entirely. What she felt was entirely too deep for a flimsy emotion such as lust.

What she felt wasn’t lust—it was love. For the first time in her life…she was in love.

In love!

“I’m going to London,” she told her father once they were home again. “My heart is in chains and I must fol ow its cal .”

Though such extravagant language was definitely not Roberta’s chosen mode of expression, she felt that quoting one of her father’s poems was a sound precaution.

“You most certainly are not!” he said, ignoring her literary reference. “I wil —”

“Without you,” she said. “And without Mrs. Grope.”

“Absolutely not!”

They battled on for a month or so until the March edition of
Rambler’s Magazine
arrived in the post.

These etchings were no more accurate than those of two years earlier. She was humped-backed and fiercely browed, on her knees before a man in livery, presumably praying for the footman’s hand in marriage. “Like father, like daughter,” the inscription read. “We always suspected that desperation was hereditary.”

Roberta had no doubt that the image was sel ing briskly in Humphrey’s Print Shop.

“My conscience is clear!” her father bel owed, once he understood the reference. “Surely you could have guessed that servants are in the pay of gossip rags? How could you not, given the fact that Mrs. Grope and myself make such frequent appearances in
Town and Country
? Someone made a pretty penny from your fol y. It’s no good begging me to write another poem; the powers of my literature would be of no avail.”

The marquess’s rage was assuaged only after writing four hundred lines of iambic pentameter rhyming “serpent’s tooth”

and “daughter,” which is no easy feat.

His daughter’s distress was diminished only by repeating to herself that she was going to marry the Duke of Vil iers, order clothes of celadon silk and never listen to another poem again in her life.

She commandeered her father’s second-best coach and the second housemaid to accompany her to London and left, clutching a valise fil ed with Mrs. Parthnel ’s unsightly clothing, a measured sum of money and a poem from her father, which was the only introduction he would vouchsafe her.

“Oh, brave new world!” she whispered to herself. And then wrinkled her nose.
No more poetry
. The Duke of Vil iers had likely never heard of John Donne and probably couldn’t tel a roundelay from a rickshaw.

He was perfect.

April 10, 1783

Beaumont House, Kensington

“I
n Paris, a married lady must have a lover or she is an unknown. And she may be pardoned two.” The door to the drawing room swung open, but the young woman sitting with her back to the door took no notice.

“Two?” an exquisitely dressed young man remarked. “I gather that Frenchmen are a happy race of men. They seemed so petulant to me when I was last there. It must be the embarrassment of riches, like having three custards after supper.”

“Three lovers are considered rather too many,” the woman replied. “Although I have known some who considered three to be a privilege rather than an abundance.” Her low laugh was a type that tickled a man’s breastbone and even lower. It said volumes about her personal abilities to manage one—or three—Frenchmen with aplomb.

Her husband closed the door behind him and stepped into the room.

The young man glanced up and came to his feet, bowing without extraordinary haste. “Your Grace.”

“Lord Corbin,” the Duke of Beaumont replied, bowing. Corbin was just to Jemma’s taste: elegant, assured and far more intel igent than he admitted. In fact, he would make a good man in parliament, not that Corbin would lower himself to something approaching work.

His brother-in-law, the Earl of Gryffyn, rose and made him a casual bow.

“Your servant, Gryffyn,” the duke said, making a leg.

“Do join us, Beaumont,” his wife said, looking up at him with an expression of the utmost friendliness. “It’s a pleasure to see you. Is the House of Lords not meeting today?” That was part and parcel with the war they had waged for the last eight years: conversation embroidered with delicate barbs, rarely with coarse emotion.

“It is in session, but I thought to spend some time with you. After al , you have barely returned from Paris.” The duke bared his teeth in an approximation of a smile.

“I miss it already,” Jemma said, with a lavish sigh. “It’s marvelous that you’re here, darling,” she said, leaning forward a bit and tapping him on the hand with her fan. “I’m just waiting for Harriet, the Duchess of Berrow, to arrive. And then we shal make a decision about the centerpiece for tomorrow’s fête.”

“Fowle tel s me that we are holding a bal .” The duke—who thought of himself as Elijah, though he would be very affronted were any person to address him so—kept his voice even. Those years of parliamentary debate were going to prove useful, now that Jemma had returned to London. ’Twas the reason he’d stayed home for the day, if truth be told. He had to strike a bargain with his wife that would curb her activities to an acceptable level. And he wouldn’t get there by losing his temper; he remembered their newlywed battles wel enough.

“Dear me, don’t tel me that I forgot to inform you! I know it’s a bit mad, but the plans gave me something to do on the voyage here.”

She looked genuinely repentant, and indeed, for al Elijah knew, she was. The game of marriage they played required strictly friendly manners in public. Not that they were ever in private.

“He just did tel you that,” her brother put in. “You’d better watch out, Sis. You’re not used to sharing a household.”

“It was truly il -mannered of me,” she said, leaping to her feet, which made her silk petticoats swirl around her narrow ankles. She was dressed in a pale blue gown
à la française,
embroidered al over with forget-me-nots. Her bodice caressed every curve of her breasts and narrow waist before the skirts bil owed over her panniers.

By al rights, the way her side hoops concealed the swel of her hips should be distasteful to a man, and yet Elijah had to admit that they played an irresistible part in a man’s imagination, leading the eye from the curve of a breast to the narrow waist, and then driving him perforce to imagine slender limbs and—and the rest of it.

Jemma held out her hand; Elijah paused for a moment and then took it. She smiled at him, as a mother might smile at a little boy reluctant to wash his face. “I am so glad that you are able to join us this morning, Beaumont. While I trust that these gentlemen have impeccable opinions”—she cast a glimmering smile at Corbin—“one’s husband’s opinion must, of course, prevail. I do declare that it’s been so long since I felt as if I
had
a husband that it is quite a novelty! I shal probably bore you to tears asking you to approve my ribbons.”

In the old days, the first days of their marriage, Elijah would have bristled. But he was seasoned by years of dedicated jousting in Parliament where the stakes were more important than ribbons and trifles. “I am quite certain that Corbin can do my duty with your ribbons.” He said it with just the right amount of disinterest and courtesy in his voice.