My American Duchess (28 page)

A
bout a fortnight into her aunt and uncle’s visit, Merry invited their immediate neighbors—Mr. Kestril, Squire and Lady Montjoy, Lord and Lady Peel—to dinner, acknowledging the calls they had paid her after the
Morning Post
announced their wedding.

Merry had believed that Mr. Kestril would abandon his courtship once she married; instead, he continued to give her longing glances whenever they encountered each other. Still, he was their nearest neighbor and it would cause gossip if he were excluded.

The dining room at Hawksmede was dark and somber, but one hardly noticed, thanks to the impressive quantity of gleaming silver that Oswald had placed down the center of the table. A pair of massive epergnes, a dish hoisted in the air by two cupids, and even a sugar caster dating back
to King Charles II in the shape of a lighthouse contributed to the air of elegance.

In between the silver were intricately cut pieces of leaded crystal, from paired glass urns to a pedestal jar with an ornate ormolu mount. The crystal threw off sparks of light that made the party look otherworldly—as Aunt Bess characteristically observed—as if every one of them had been “anointed” by fairy dust.

Lady Peel, who was too elderly to engage in flummery, crushed Aunt Bess’s flight of fancy by saying that
she
thought that the speckles of reflected candlelight made them all look as if they had had the pox. “Smallpox scars can’t be concealed by rice powder,” she informed them. “Queen Elizabeth plastered hers over with a mixture of white lead and vinegar, which explains why she always looks like a cadaver in portraits.”

This was just the sort of information that Merry loved, so it led to a lively discussion of cosmetics. Mr. Kestril offered the opinion that cosmetic preparations signaled selfish vanity. He followed this with a doting look at Merry’s unadorned face.

Lady Peel snorted—speaking across the table—and roundly told him that if she wished to put white paste on the end of her nose, she would, and he could keep his opinions to himself.

While not precisely agreeing with Kestril, Squire Montjoy disclosed that he preferred it when ladies presented a natural appearance.

Lady Peel laughed aloud at the squire, and declared he wouldn’t know “natural” if it struck him in the face.

Merry managed to keep her eyes away from the squire’s wife, who had made lavish use of rice powder, among other preparations.

“I presume you think I am naturally this beautiful,” Lady Peel announced.

Merry met Trent’s eyes and saw that she was not alone in suppressing a violent impulse to laugh.

Bess rose to the occasion, and expressed the opinion that if Lady Peel used cosmetics, she did so in a remarkably natural fashion.

“I color my hair,” Lady Peel said triumphantly. “I have for years. I use cumin seed, saffron, and celandine. I’d recommend it, Mrs. Pelford. A lady cannot afford to let her hair turn white, as yours seems to be doing.”

Merry rose to signal the ladies’ retirement to the drawing room, judging that the gentlemen had learned as many intimate details as they cared to about their wives’ toilettes.

Bess showed her disgruntlement with the mention of her fading hair by sweeping the squire’s wife onto a settee for a chat, leaving Merry with Lady Peel.

“Young Kestril is gaping at you like a trout trying to catch a bug,” Lady Peel observed. “My goodness, but that man is as foolish as they come.”

“You don’t suppose that he thinks I might return his regard, do you?” Merry asked.

“Oh no. He realizes that you’re newly married, and anyone can see yours is a love match, even if all the newspapers hadn’t told us as much. Did you see how he’s drinking himself into a standstill? He’ll wake up one of these days, as dry as a raisin, and realize that he’s been yearning after a married lady who hasn’t the faintest interest in him. I shouldn’t be surprised if he went off to India for a spell.”

“That seems extreme,” Merry said, taken aback.

“Everyone is saying that he’s lost the estate to creditors. A gamester, but not in the usual way, since he put his money behind an expedition to bring back an orchid
as big as a dinner plate.” She snorted. “As if such a thing existed!”

That made sense. Trent invested his money in a flint mine and now a steam engine in Philadelphia, whereas Kestril bid on a dream flower bigger than his head that might exist in a land he’d never been to.

“I like what you’re doing with the grounds,” Lady Peel said, leaping from exotic to domestic horticulture. “I’ve told my gardener that I want raised cabbage beds.”

“You are the third person tonight to mention cabbages,” Merry said with some amusement. “I certainly hope the beds live up to their promise.”

“That remains to be seen,” Lady Peel said. “God knows what the soil is like in America.”

Merry started to defend her country’s soil, when Lady Peel gave a bark of laughter and patted her hand. “There, there, Your Grace. I only meant that there’s a powerful amount of clay in the Buckinghamshire soil. We’ll be watching like hawks to see how your experiments work out.”

“Oh,” Merry said, stunned by the idea her gardens were being so closely watched.

Lady Peel gave her a sympathetic look. “I imagine it will take some getting used to, being an American and all. The Duke and Duchess of Trent are as close to royalty as we get around here. If you decide to eat a blackbird for breakfast, there won’t be a single black feather left within ten miles. Everyone will insist on dining on a songbird that very night.”

“Why on earth would I eat a blackbird?” Merry asked, startled.

“Don’t,” the lady declared. “I ate one once and it was all bones. Better in shrubbery and out of sight—like drunken young men, now I think of it. Hopefully your duke is
wresting the brandy away from Kestril. He suffered quite enough of that behavior from his brother and father, I should think.”

Did everyone know everything, here in the country?

Lady Peel’s next comment confirmed that the countryside did indeed know all about everything. “I approve of all that time you’re spending out of doors. You’re likely already carrying the heir, after all, and my mother always maintained the fresh air was best for a woman in that condition. None of this shutting ladies up in stuffy bedchambers, as they do in London.”

She hoisted herself up from her chair. “You’ve turned pink,” she observed. “I suppose that’s owing to young love. I didn’t experience it myself, thank goodness. It seems an uncomfortable condition, based on Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels, at least. Now if you will excuse me, I must visit the retiring room.”

Merry took her ladyship’s arm and helped her down the corridor.

“I had doubts about you,” the lady said, a few steps later. “An American and all. As a duchess—
our
duchess!”

Merry cleared her throat. “I apologize.”

“But you’ll do,” Lady Peel went on. “The way you’re holding my arm, for instance.”

“Yes?”

“The former duchess wouldn’t have soiled her fingers.” She hadn’t an ounce of resentment in her tone. “High and mighty as the queen herself, she was. My family goes back to fat Henry—you know, the Eighth—but that wasn’t far enough for her. I don’t suppose you know the difference, do you?”

Once again, Merry couldn’t decide on an appropriate answer, but it didn’t matter, as Lady Peel just kept talking.

“The Duchess of Trent wouldn’t know
Debrett’s
from a book of sermons. The world’s a queer old place.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained from announcing that she had memorized
Debrett’s
all the way through H, so Merry held her tongue.

“You ain’t a duchess in the old mold,” the lady said. “But I’ll be jiggered if I don’t like the new mold even better!”

T
rent had watched Kestril grow more inebriated throughout the meal. With every glass, he threw another longing look at Merry, until Trent had a nearly irresistible urge to toss him out the front door.

After the meal, Trent endured Kestril’s lecture about orchids until the clock finally inched to the time when he could bid their guests farewell.

When they had seen the last of them off, and the Pelfords had retired to their chambers, he followed Merry upstairs, adjusting his pace because it was difficult to walk after a four-hour cockstand. Along the corridor. Through the bedchamber door.

Closed the door, trying not to slam it.

As if they were magnetized, they flew at each other, Merry laughing and Trent too overcome to laugh, buttons flying now and then, the wall brought into use.

Afterward, he hung over her, panting, sweating. She was so damned beautiful. He couldn’t decide the color of her eyes, because they were always changing, different in candlelight, after making love, when laughing.

Later they lay face-to-face, their legs entangled, and talked.

“What was your father like?” Merry said, following some train of thought in her head.

Trent didn’t care for the question. He ran one hand in a
caress down his wife’s back, sweeping up the gentle slope of her arse, but he didn’t answer.

“Jack, I asked you a question!” Merry said it severely, but he saw a gleam in her eyes, and her bottom wiggled under his hands.

“My father was a drunkard,” he said, squeezing the words from a mind that was going foggy with desire. “Drunkards are . . .” He shrugged.

“Are what?”

“They’re all the same,” he said, getting on with the explanation because he wanted it over. He rolled on top of her, elbows braced at her sides. “Cedric and my father were very different when sober, but not when they were drunk. One fuddled man is just like another: ill-behaved, quarrelsome, and often vulgar.”

“Cedric’s behavior at the Vereker ball was certainly not admirable,” Merry acknowledged.

“His worst self,” Trent said. “My father was the same when he was soaked.”

Merry’s legs moved restlessly under him, desire expressed without words. “What does that feel like?” he asked.

“What?” she replied, her breath catching as he rocked against her.

“This.”

“Oh.” Her forehead creased. He pressed forward again. Pink was rising in her cheeks and her fingers curled, holding tightly on to his shoulders.

“Empty,” she whispered. “I suddenly feel empty, as if I remember that you aren’t there and I need you so much.”

Trent’s grin went all the way to his toes. “Let me help you with that,” he said hoarsely.

The following night, words flowed out of Merry like
a stream, something about a plant called the
Campanula portenschlagiana
that she had read about in
Curtis’s Botanical Magazine
.

“Some sort of rare plant?” he roused himself to ask. He found it hard to think after making love to Merry, whereas she became more talkative. It turned out that she was talking about the bellflowers that could be found on any roadside.

After years of having no one to listen to, he discovered that he loved listening to her. Some people didn’t like American accents, but he thought her voice sounded like water in a river, light and sparkling.

Their discussion wandered into uses for gravel (bellflowers require excellent drainage), and from there to farming methods in Wales compared to those in Massachusetts. Then innovations in plumbing and whether they might work for garden irrigation—and by extension for field irrigation.

That led to canals, not as a means of transport, but as a means of helping to control flooding.

One night, they found themselves talking about his father again until Trent managed to change the subject around to
her
father. Merry was lying across his chest, her hair trailing off the edge of the bed.

“He was an inventor and a diplomat,” she said, “but I just thought of him as my father. Do you know what I find one of the hardest parts about his death?”

Trent shook his head.

“We never said good-bye. I saw him at luncheon, and we only talked about silly things. I had a doll named Penny and I was trying to persuade him to build me a small boat so that I could sail her on Boston Common. All the boys had boats and the girls didn’t.”

“Was he good at building boats?”

“He could make anything,” Merry said, her voice husky with sincerity. “I do think he was a genius, Jack.” She lifted her head from his chest so she could meet his eyes. She kept talking about her father, but Trent lost the thread . . . because she was so damned beautiful.

“Beautiful” wasn’t the right word. It sounded merely physical, whereas everything about Merry glowed from inside. He was thinking about that when he realized that she’d paused and was looking at him expectantly.

“Ah.”

She dropped a kiss on his nose. “The last thing that my father said to me was that he’d be home to tuck me into bed. Do you remember what yours said?”

He did remember. His father had been drunk, very drunk. He’d called Oswald a goatish pignut, and then he called the coachman a lout. Cedric had tried to stop their mother from getting in the phaeton and their father had turned on Cedric and called him lily-livered. And worse.

“No,” he said. “I can’t remember.”

He saw in her eyes the moment that she decided not to challenge his fib. “It must have been so difficult to lose both your parents at once. I can’t imagine.”

Cedric had engaged in public bouts of weeping. Trent had not.

He ran a hand down her slim back. “My father was a drunkard, Merry. No one mourned him.”

There was a flash of sympathy in her eyes, but rather than speak, she decided to kiss him and make it better.

Trent had never liked drinking. But if drinking were like Merry’s kisses, he’d be a drunk. His head spun when their tongues slid against each other, and she made that achy little sound in the back of her throat . . .

He was drunk on her.

Besotted by kisses.

At the beginning of July, Thaddeus decided that given the French navy was back in operation, delay would mean a risky journey. So he and Bess took off for London and thence to America, promising to return the following spring. Later, Merry cried, and Trent kissed away the tears and seduced her out of her sadness.