Desperate Duchesses (34 page)

“A boat?” Roberta said, al owing him to pul her away. “But this is land.”

“I know, but she has her own boat anyway.”

She did, indeed, have a boat. It was a round little vessel, a boat-shaped cottage. It was painted a faded blue, with curly letters on the side that read
Versifying Mermaid
. A smal line of people waited restlessly outside. A burly fel ow was timing the line, and let another person in every few minutes.

“Where do they go?” Teddy asked.

“Out the back door,” his father said.

Roberta was looking at the line, which consisted solely of men. “Damon, go and ask that person in front if the mermaid is appropriately dressed for a young boy,” she said.

Damon looked down at Teddy, dancing on one leg. “You must be joking. We couldn’t leave, even if she is wearing nothing more than a fish scale on one toe.”

“Yes, we can,” she said firmly. So Damon made his way over to the guard in front.

“Where’s Papa going?” Teddy said. “And where’s
your
papa going?”

Her father was standing before a tent marked
Harry Hunks, Performing Bear
. He turned around and beckoned. “This bear can blow a whistle and dance a jig,” he shouted.

Teddy was there in a second, so Roberta fol owed them into the cool interior of the tent. The smel of bear was overpowering, however, and she backed out directly, straight into Damon.

His arms came around her from behind. “I like that,” he said. He pul ed her more firmly against him.

“Your cut-away coat?” she asked, pul ing away.

“There are some things a gentleman can’t control,” he said. “You should have seen me when I was younger.”

“Real y? How so?”

“Fourteen was an interesting year.”

“Wasn’t that when Miss Kendrick began sending you perfumed letters?”

He nodded, a lock of hair brushing his eyes. “I had absolutely no control of my body.”

“You mean…” Her eyes slid down his front.

He nodded. “If someone had even mentioned a versifying mermaid, I would have thought about mermaid breasts and been rigid for the next hour. Maybe you and I can play mermaids later?” He grinned wolfishly at her.

She smiled, but said, “What of this particular mermaid? Is she adequately clothed?”

“Oh yes,” Damon said. “The man there indicated that this mermaid was pul ed from the water twenty-two years ago and has been versifying ever since. He got a bit offended at the idea that she might not be proper fare for children and said that she was a vicar’s daughter. Now that I doubt, but if I were a thirty-year-old mermaid, I’d avail myself of some friendly seaweed. Is Teddy in there with the bear, by the way?”

“And the smel ,” Roberta said.

Suddenly they heard her father’s voice, loud and clear through the tent flap. “Do you mean to tel me, Mr. Clay, that you starve the bear if he doesn’t behave?”

“He only misses his supper,” a voice protested in reply. “And he knows, right enough, that’s he’s done wrong, sir. That he does. Just like any dog. Why, I hardly ever have to take a whip—”

“You whip this bear?” the marquess said, his voice rising to a roar.

People in line at the mermaid’s tent turned their heads, and a few others drifted closer. Roberta’s hand crept into Damon’s, but somehow her usual feelings of mortification and shame at the fact her father was about to make a spectacle weren’t creeping over her.

A second later, her father spil ed out of the tent, followed by a lean, hungry-looking fel ow, presumably Mr. Clay.

“I can’t bear the stench another moment,” her father said. “Not another moment. And just think what that poor bear makes of it, sir, since in the normal way of things he’d be living at the top of a tal tree, smel ing nothing but the blue sky!”

They al reflexively looked up. “I does my best,” Mr. Clay bleated.

“Your best isn’t good enough!” the marquess said. “I’l have that bear, or I’l know the reason why.”

Cutting off Mr. Clay’s ineffectual bluster, the marquess produced a handful of guineas, and ownership of Harry Hunks passed hands.

“I’l fetch him tomorrow,” the marquess said. “And you’d better be at your residence with the bear, Mr. Clay, or I shal have the High Constable on you!”

Mr. Clay was looking blissful y at the guineas in his hand. “I can go back home with these,” he said. “I’l be there, your lordship, and so wil Harry.”

“I’l have more of those for you if you can find a cart to take Harry to my country house.”

Damon leaned over and said in Roberta’s ear, “How many bears do you have at home?”

“None,” she said.

“Oh.”

“But we do have a couple of deer that were supposed to be elk, but turned out to have horns glued on, a terrible weight for their poor heads, I assure you. And we have some Greenland ducks—”

“
Greenland
ducks?” Damon said with a crack of laughter.

“Hush! Papa wil hear you. They are rather peculiar, and we think they’re a strain of exotic chicken because they can’t swim. At first papa dropped them into the lake and it was only very quick work on the part of a groom that saved their life.”

Meanwhile, they had made their way back to the mermaid’s boat. The marquess dropped a few coins into the guard’s hands.

“He’s a
pirate!
” Teddy said, awed.

Damon ducked his head as they went through the low door of the boat. Seated in the corner was a mermaid.

She was quite pretty, with long golden hair and a sweet face. She had a glossy green tail wrapped with a net and a few artistical y placed shel s. Unlike any picture he’d ever seen of a siren of the deep, she wore a starched white bodice that overlapped the beginning of her tail. In fact, she looked a bit like a vicar’s daughter. Except for the satin tail, of course.

Teddy marched up before her, and said, “May I ask you questions?”

The mermaid nodded at Teddy and smiled.

“I will answer whatever I can,

As a daughter of the sea to a child of man.”

The marquess started rocking back and forth on his heels, a sure sign of enjoyment.

“Are you friends with fish?” Teddy asked.

“Fish were my favorite boon companions,

My very best friend was a shark,

We would whip about and have great fun,

Until I was caught by His Majesty’s barque.”

“Sharks!” Teddy said, eyes round. “I thought they were the monsters of the deep, and ate everything in their path.”

“Have you met a shark, Oh child of the sands?

For ignorance is no excuse for those with hands.”

Teddy shook his head. “I’d love to meet a shark,” he said, coming closer.

“How long have you lived in this boat, oh daughter of the sea?” the marquess asked. He had his hands clasped behind his back and he was grinning like a fool.

“Your father seems to be taken by the mermaid’s versifying abilities,” Damon murmured to Roberta.

“Or something,” she said.

She’d seen that ecstatic look on his face before. Specifical y, when Selina pranced out on the stage of her traveling troupe, and when they first saw Mrs. Grope stride onto the stage in Bath.

“
The memory of my watery cave grows dim
,” the mermaid was saying, “
’Tis been twenty years ere I swam in the deep,
Now I almost think I am growing a limb.”

“Nicely put,” Damon said.

The guard popped his head in and growled, “Time’s up. The mermaid has others waiting for her.”

The marquess turned to the mermaid.

“Could a gentleman’s family lure a mermaid to swim,

If we arranged it so she needn’t stir a fin,

Into the shallows of a tea garden for tea,

Upon the earnest request of—of me?”

“Tsk, Tsk,” Damon said. “That final rhyme left something to be desired, my lord.”

But the mermaid dimpled and looked as if she were blushing a little. But instead of answering, interestingly enough, she looked at Roberta. She nodded toward her tail, and then toward Teddy. After a second, Roberta realized that she was asking if Teddy would be upset to learn that the mermaid did indeed have limbs.

Roberta gave her a smile. “It’s so hot in here,” she said, turning to Damon. “I think I should like to go home. And Teddy, it’s time that we said goodbye to the lovely mermaid.”

Teddy bowed, very solemn. “It has been marvelous to meet you.”

“You remind me of a shark I once knew, called Perth,”
she said, perfectly seriously.
“He had lovely brown eyes like
yours, Oh child of the earth.”

Teddy bowed again and took Roberta’s hand as they left through the rear. “I should like to be a shark,” he said, and he chattered so much on the way back to the carriage that he didn’t even notice that the marquess wasn’t with them until they got home.

Whereupon Roberta told him that her papa had gone to arrange for Harry Hunks to travel back home with him.

“I want to see Harry Hunks again,” Teddy said wistful y.

“You wil ,” Damon said, smiling at Roberta over his head. “You wil .”

Day eight of the Villiers/Beaumont chess matches

R
oberta stretched, feeling a pleasurable ache in al parts of her body, and then settled down to think.

Obviously, she needed to think. She plumped up the pil ows to remove the unmistakable evidence that there had been two heads sleeping in her bed and thought:
the Duke of Villiers.

My fiancé.

It was rather disconcerting to realize how fickle she was.

El en bustled in and began darting around the room, trailing a stream of conversation.

“A picnic?” Roberta said, belatedly catching the word. “Who?”

It seemed that everyone was going on this picnic. “Not the master, of course,” El en said. “He’s gone to his offices long ago.”

Roberta thought about it. A picnic on the Fleet River sounded like a delicious way to avoid the thorny issue of her fiancé.

“Marvelous,” she said, swinging her legs out of bed.

“Her Grace is just playing her move with the Duke of Vil iers,” El en said.

Roberta froze. “Is the duke accompanying us?”

“Of course,” El en said, giving her a warm smile. “I’m sure he wouldn’t miss it. He enquired for you yesterday, but you were off with the mermaid. What Master Teddy hasn’t told us about that mermaid!”

The picnic involved not just one flat-bottomed boat, but a whole fleet of them. Roberta climbed into a boat without any difficulty, and Teddy clambered next to her, taking it for granted that the two of them would sit together.

“I have a great deal to tel you,” he said. “I talked to Rummer al morning and—this wil
really
interest you, Lady Roberta—I discovered what a bog-trotting croggie is!”

Jemma almost had to have a boat to herself, given the width of her panniers, and there were a few screams when the Duke of Vil iers’s cane caught on the side of the boat and he fel directly into Jemma’s lap.

Roberta had a difficult time keeping her mind on the question of bogs and croggies, because it seemed to her that Vil iers took a long time to disentangle himself from Jemma’s lap. In fact, Roberta couldn’t help wondering where her fiancé spent the night. Did his chess game shift to something more intimate?

Mrs. Grope climbed into the boat rather grimly; she was intent on tel ing the company at large that she was used to large pleasure boats, such as those the Prince of Wales traveled in, though Roberta doubted very much that Mrs. Grope had ever been on a boat at the same time as the prince.

“We played a lovely game of charades aboard His Majesty’s yacht,” she could hear her tel ing her father. “Why, the girls and I were talking about it last night in the green room…” She looked wistful y into the distance.

Damon settled himself opposite and met her eyes with a grin. “Dol ymop charades,” he mouthed.

Roberta couldn’t help giggling. The world was a beautiful place when one was going boating with a lovely, loose-limbed man, who had done such delicious things the night before…She even felt a flash of approval for Vil iers and his idea that chastity was an antiquated notion. He was right!

She gave Vil iers a huge smile, boat to boat. He seemed rather taken aback, but nodded.

“Too demonstrative,” Damon observed. “You can’t go smiling at your fiancé like that. Smiles, words…those are for ordinary mortals. The two of you should communicate only in nods.”

She turned her nose up at his sil iness.

Teddy was eager to talk about a Mr. Swarthy, who often wears brown paper pinned to his white silk stockings. “Do you know why that is, Lady Roberta?”

Teddy had an endearing earnestness about him. His chin was real y adorable. It was tiny with a little dimple that mimicked his father’s. “I don’t have any idea,” Roberta said. “I wouldn’t pin brown paper to my legs; would you?”

“He does it in bad weather,” Teddy reported. “And he also sings ‘Fair Dorinda’ in the coffeehouse, and they don’t like it.”

They were drifting down the river. The river was more dappled and green today, sleepy in the sunshine.

“The water sounds like babies talking,” Teddy said.

“I think you’re going to be a novelist,” Roberta told him, listening for the little sleepy murmurs of watery babies.

He beamed and slipped a damp hand into her gloved one. Roberta looked down at his plump fingers and then pul ed off her gloves and picked up his hand again.

Mrs. Grope was squealing because a family of ducks was fol owing their boat. For a moment she couldn’t see what was happening, and then she realized that her father had raided the picnic hamper and was dropping cucumber sandwiches into the water.

Jemma and Vil iers weren’t even looking at the water; Vil iers had a piece of paper and they were scribbling with a pencil and talking. As she watched, Jemma snatched the paper back and wrote something on it.

Damon fol owed her glance. “Working out a chess game,” he said. “Jemma’s chamber is always fil ed with pieces of paper covered with imaginary games.”

“How on earth do you write out a chess game?”