Desperate Duchesses (38 page)

“I am not,” Roberta said, rather startled. “I didn’t known there were female members.”

“There are,” he said with a regal bow. “May I help you, Madame?”

“I should like to see the Duke of Vil iers,” she said.

“I’m afraid that he is upstairs, in the Members’ Rooms, and no one who is not a member is al owed therein.”

“You wil have to make an exception,” Roberta said.

There must have been something in her eye because he stopped being a starched butler and cowered a little. “Of course, you are a lady,” he said.

“I am not
any
lady,” she told him. “I am engaged to the Duke of Vil iers.”

“In that case!” he said, gesturing to the stairs. “After you, my lady, after you.”

She climbed up the stairs and a moment later found herself in a room fil ed with gentlemen. They were al watching Vil iers, which made it easy to find him, at any rate. He was spectacularly dressed, sitting at one end of the table, his legs spread wide. He looked absorbed, elegant—and dangerous.

Roberta dizzily took in the muscled strength of his shoulders and the control ed menace in the way he put down each chess piece. He looked like a man who would slay an opponent with no more emotion than he would take a pawn.

“Your Grace,” she said, coming to stand before the table. The other man looked up quickly and suddenly the whole room was on their feet, bowing and scraping. She ignored them, looking directly at Vil iers. “Your Grace,” she said, dropping a curtsy.

“I came to beg some private conversation.”

His eyes rested on her, cold, indifferent. How had she ever thought that was an attractive trait in a man? He was loathsome to her now, snakelike in his magnificence.

“I see no reason for that,” he said. “I am in the middle of a match, as you see.”

“Please, Your Grace,” she pleaded.

But he looked at her with something akin to hatred. “If you must speak, speak here. There is nothing, it seems, in my life that is secret—is there, St. Albans?”

The slender young man standing to the side shrugged. “It is the fate of al of us to occasional y find our faces depicted in the windows of Humphrey’s.” His eyes lingered on Roberta, and she realized that he knew precisely who she was, and he was thinking about the cartoons in
Rambler’s Magazine
that were sold in Humphrey’s Print Shop. Slowly she looked about and while she didn’t see hostility, she did see knowledge. They knew who she was. They knew that she had been cartooned as desperate for a husband, as begging a footman to marry her. They knew that she had spurned Vil iers for the Earl of Gryffyn.

She looked back at Vil iers. He stood beside his chair, his eyes impenetrable.

She walked a step forward, and then she fel to her knees.

There was a gasp in the room, and a rustle of agitation. Roberta ignored it. “Please, Your Grace.
Please
do not fight a duel with the Earl of Gryffyn. He is my future husband, and I cannot bear to see him die.”

“I would not have expected this of you,” he said, staring down at her and actual y looking rather startled. “I thought you were of different stock than your father, Lady Roberta.”

“You were in error. I find myself more like him every day.
Please
. I am begging you. I am desperate.”

There was a murmur around the room, a flourishing of whispers. “Raise her up,” someone said to Vil iers. And: “This isn’t decent.”

Vil iers started, and came forward. He reached out a hand but she shook her head. “Not until you promise.”

“I cannot promise,” he told her, and she could have sworn that she saw a flash of sympathy in those cold eyes of his. “It’s no longer a matter of your honor, but that of Gryffyn’s.”

“My honor is worthless!” she cried.

He stooped down and brought her to her feet. “Your courage is not worthless, Lady Roberta.” He kept her hands for a moment. “I wil apologize,” he said. “That’s the best I can do, and since I’ve never done such a thing before in my life, you see that my apology means that I put your honor at a rather higher pitch than your own valuation.”

He dropped her hands and turned away. “If you’l forgive me, milady, we have a chess match to finish.”

An arm came around her shoulder, and Roberta felt herself pul ed away.

“Mr. Cunningham!” she said dul y. “I didn’t see you.”

“I often play a match during the afternoon when His Grace is in the House of Lords.” He said nothing further, and Roberta couldn’t bring herself to say anything either. So he accompanied her home in silence.

It had to be enough.

It simply…had to be enough.

Day eleven: the Beaumont/Beaumont chess match

remains in play

D
awn was curling over Wimbledon Commons, making the wheels of al the carriages disappear and look as if their fat belies were scraping the ground.

“I shal be sick,” Roberta said between clenched teeth.

“Open the carriage door,” Jemma said, not helpful y. She was crying, just a little. She hadn’t said anything, but Roberta saw her wipe away a tear, and then another. “Damon wil be fine,” she said, as if to herself.

“Does he know how to fight with a sword?” Roberta whispered.

Jemma frowned at her. “Of course he does!”

Carriages and more carriages kept pul ing up until there was a double row, and men pushed by their door as if they were going to see a cock fight.

“Vil iers said he would apologize,” Roberta said. “He promised.” Her fists were clenched. “Should I go and remind him, Jemma?” she cried. “Should I go and see what’s happening?”

But Jemma shook her head, her eyes bleak. “You’ve done al you can. If you shame Vil iers in front of al these people, there’s no saying what he might do.”

“What would shame him?” Roberta asked desperately.

“To have you intervene again. And you would shame Damon.”

“But he would
live
!”

“He wil live,” Jemma said. But her face was icy white.

“I begged him not to go,” Roberta said. “He just laughed.”

“That’s Damon.”

They waited, and stil fog curled in the center of the field, and nothing happened. “What is a rapier?” Roberta said, forcing the words past stiff lips. “Do you know?”

“A thin blade,” Jemma said. “It is favored by the French and considered to be agile, intel igent and supple.”

“What?” Roberta said, unable to get her mind around this cluster of adjectives. “Do you think that Damon can fight with it?

”

Jemma turned her head and stared at her. “What makes you question Damon’s ability so?”

Just then two men walked onto the field and Roberta gasped. They weren’t Vil iers and Damon, but the seconds. They seemed to be scuffing the grass, seeing if it was slippery with dew.

“Because,” she said, “Vil iers himself told me that chess players are the finest duelists. That makes him the finest sword fighter in the kingdom. It’s not Damon’s skil I’m worried about. It’s Vil iers’s that terrifies me.”

Jemma laughed, and the sound of it jarred Roberta to the bottom of her stomach. “What makes you think that Damon can’t play chess?”

“He never—He—”

“He’s quite likely the best chess player in England,” Jemma said flatly. “My father taught us both and it was his considered opinion that Damon had an edge on me. Damon finds the game boring because it doesn’t present enough of a chal enge.”

Roberta swal owed. “Not enough of a chal enge? Then, what?”

“Have you talked of nothing, al this time you spent in bed together?”

Roberta shook her head. “Not about the right things.”

“Bil s of Exchange. He plays with them, manipulates the market. He moves on a larger chess board; he’s like my husband in that.”

“He real y can fence?”

“Of course,” Jemma said irritably. “He’s fought at least four duels that I know of.”

“Did he win al four?”

“Of course.”

“He told me last night that he had decided to strike Vil iers in the right shoulder.”

“There you see the thought pattern of a master player,” Jemma said. “Philidor often cal ed the piece with which he would check my king.”

“But were any of Damon’s previous opponents chess masters?”

There was a sigh. “No.”

To the side of the field, Damon was talking to his second. “There’s not so much fog that we can’t see,” he said impatiently. He wanted to get this over with and go back to breakfast with Roberta. He knew she was there, poor mouse, huddled in the carriage with Jemma.

The second hurried over to talk to Vil iers’s second, and then rushed back.

“His Grace would like to speak to you a moment,” he said.

Damon dropped his coat onto the wet grass. He would fight in his old boots and a shirt, rol ed up to the sleeves. He took one more look at his rapier, a beautiful length of steel from Toledo. He almost had an unfair advantage, using it. Stil , he picked it up and strol ed over to Vil iers’s gaudy carriage.

The duke was stripped to a shirt. He was bending his blade, testing its spring.

“Toledo,” Damon said with pleasure. “Excel ent.”

Vil iers lifted those heavy eyes of his and murmured, “An even match is always best.”

Damon waited a moment but Vil iers seemed to be having some trouble speaking. Final y, he said in an almost strangled voice, “I want to apologize.”

“What?”

“Apologize. I should not have maligned Lady Roberta’s honor.”

Damon narrowed his eyes. “She got to you, didn’t she?”

Vil iers looked up again. “What do you mean?”

“Roberta. What did she do, exactly?”

“She fel on her knees in Parsloe’s,” Vil iers said flatly. “She begged me not to fight you.”

“Sounds very dramatic.” Damon loved the sound of it.

“Oh, believe me,” Vil iers said. “It was. She enjoyed a wide audience.”

“Right. Now that’s out of the way, shal we start?”

Vil iers glanced at him. “My apology?”

“I would have acquiesced to any demand of hers as wel ,” Damon said. “But the fact of it is, Vil iers, we’re going to fight.

Now.”

Vil iers, looking up at the earl, saw him as a man with an easy smile, a man whom he had obviously never understood. A sudden thought struck him. “Do you play chess?”

“Never,” Damon said promptly. “Bores me to tears. The only partner I ever had who could give me a chal enge was my sister. How’s the game with her going, by the way?”

Vil iers stared at him. Gryffyn was as unmoved by the prospect of a duel as he was by the prospect of death. For the first time, he felt a faint prickling. A faint warning in the back of his mind. “I lost,” he said. “I lost the game yesterday.”

But the earl was already striding out onto the field, hailing their seconds.

Vil iers walked out more slowly, rearranging his expectations of the game. He was going to have to kil —or be kil ed. In the earl’s eyes was the deadly cheer of a man whose future wife has been maligned and who wil die to protect her honor.

Except that Gryffyn clearly had no intention of dying.

Two minutes later they were circling each other, their boots leaving prints on the wet grass.

“We can wait until the sun dries the grass if you’d like,” Gryffyn offered.

“No.” Vil iers couldn’t help but remember himself, offering Gordon a rook advantage.

He started watching for an opening. The earl seemed content to circle forever. Final y Vil iers swooped in with an upward-cutting
manchette
blow. Parried by Gryffyn. He tried a
pass in tierce
and a
redoublement
. Parried, and parried again. Final y Vil iers fel back, deciding to let the earl make the next move.

When he did, it was supremely smooth, a twisting, swirling
demi-volte
that seemed to come out of nowhere. It was only luck that Vil iers’s blade caught his opponent’s rapier, deflecting the blow.

Gryffyn fel back and they circled once more. But there was something different about him now; the brooding joy of a predator was in every movement of those long legs.

There was nothing so terrible about that, except that Vil iers himself didn’t have the energy of virtue behind him. He felt wrong.

He shouldn’t have cal ed Roberta a concubine, not after he told her to go lose her chastity. He was the one who whipped her into Gryffyn’s bed, and then castigated her for it. And then too…there was Benjamin in the back of his mind.

Even as he parried a bril iant time-thrust from the earl, he thought about how nothing had gone right since Benjamin died.

It was his infernal arrogance, that was it.

The earl tried a
prise de fer
; he knocked it to the side. Vil iers felt rage rising, final y, from the bottom of his soul. What was he doing on a field in the cold dawn, fighting a duel with a man he was uninterested in kil ing?

“I’m not going to kil you,” he said, panting, circling, watching the earl’s hands.

“I’m not going to kil you, either,” the earl said. He didn’t appear to be even breathing quickly, which was gal ing. “I might have, but you apologized.”

They circled again.

“I can’t have Roberta think that her apology was for naught,” the earl said. “The right shoulder should do it.”

Vil iers narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t even see the
envelopment
coming. It came from above, and sang through the air with a melody like death, twisted, flicked at the last second, slid home with a terrible scrape by the bone.

Vil iers’s rapier dropped to the ground.

Gryffyn withdrew his blade; it was glossy with blood. Vil iers bent over, breathing heavily.

Gryffyn shouted, “We could use the surgeon here!”

Vil iers heard feet, and realizing for the first time how close the circle of spectators had come, straightened. Blood was running down his right arm and oddly, it felt cold rather than warm. “I regret any impunity to your lady’s honor,” he said, resorting to the antiquated language used by their grandparents.

“I am at your service,” Gryffyn replied.

The surgeon was upon them, offering Vil iers a bottle of brandy and ripping off his shirt. Gryffyn was off, running—he was actual y running—toward the Duke of Beaumont’s carriage.