The Perfect Mistress (56 page)

But as she reached the bottom of the stairs, Parnell announced the duke of Carlisle, and she looked up to find her father bearing down on her with a frazzled expression. He grazed her cheek with a kiss, then swung an agitated gaze about the center hall. "Where is she?"

There was no need to ask who was meant.

"Mother arrived some time ago," Gabrielle said, looking around for her mother. "Come, I'll help you find her. It will soon be time to put William to bed."

Slipping her arm through his, she accompanied him through the throng of guests, searching each room until at last, they heard Rosalind's throaty laugh coming from the half-opened library door… carried on a pungent curl of smoke.

"I might have known," the duke growled, pushing open the door to discover Rosalind ensconced on Pierce's mahogany desk in a circle of gentlemen. She was gowned in her now customary navy silk dress with an elegant lace collar and her hair was done in the simple style she wore every day in her work at the Magdalen Society Home. And she was smoking a small black cigar.

"Why, there he is now," Rosalind said with an indecently flirtatious smile.

"Augustus, darling, we were just talking about you. I'm afraid I can't recall the length of that horrid crocodile you killed on the Congo River."

"If so, it will be the only damned thing you've forgotten in the last twenty years," the duke said gruffly.

The laughter that greeted his remark was a recognition of his predicament as the central figure in a sizzling roman à clef penned by Rosalind… a thinly disguised and highly publicized account of her twenty years as a woman of pleasure. In the first two years after her abrupt retirement from the demimonde, Rosalind had taken Beatrice's advice and thrown both herself and her considerable financial resources into all manner of public and charitable causes. She possessed a perfect genius for parting men from their money—a skill she had perfected at the expense of the duke—and organizations that served the charitable trust were quick to embrace her fund-raising skills and provide her with almost instant acceptance. Then in the last year, feeling ever more stifled by her mounting respectability, she produced a flaming novel that had sent ripples of shock through London's elite and chagrin through the duke of Carlisle.

"I would have a word with you, Rosalind," he declared, looking very much like a man with something urgent on his mind. "Now… if you please."

He had to wait for her to put out her cigar and watch as the gentlemen around her vied for the privilege of lifting her down from her perch on Pierce's desk. But in a short while, he was escorting her up the main stairs toward the nursery.

Gabrielle sighed as she stood at the bottom of the main stairs, watching them go, then she headed for the drawing room, where she found Pierce engaged in conversation with Lord Rosebery and Lady Devonshire. Putting an arm through Pierce's, she pried him gently from their company and urged him toward the stairs.

"I believe you promised to say good night to your son."

"So I did." He smiled down at her, warmed by the sight of her jewel-bright eyes and sumptuously displayed charms.

"Father arrived a few minutes ago," she said.

"I thought I heard a crack of thunder." He chuckled. "Poor man, your mother has been driving him mad." The duke's heated pursuit of Gabrielle's mother, after an affair of more than twenty years' duration, never failed to amuse Pierce. But it also tantalized him. The three years of his marriage to Gabrielle hadn't dimmed her attraction for him in the least, and he couldn't help but wonder if his passion for her would be as fervent as the duke's for Rosalind after two decades of loving. "I hope she says 'yes' and puts him out of his misery."

"Yes?" Gabrielle gave him a puzzled look. "To what?"

"He has asked her to marry him." When she halted on the stairs, looking stunned, he urged her to continue up the steps. "He spoke to me last week…

said he was about to propose and asked what I thought."

"My parents… married?" She stopped again.

"Impetuous and impossible of him, I know." His smile filled with mischief. "But being the impetuous and impossible sort myself, I couldn't think of a single good reason to object to my father-in-law marrying my mother-in-law… titles be hanged. In keeping with family loyalties, I promised to lend him my support if he runs afoul of the gossipmongers of St. James."

"My parents… married," she said with wonderment, thinking for a moment of her own wedding three years before, of the strange courtship that preceded it and the determined seduction that followed it—of rosebushes and shoes and harem pants and orphans playing football… She came back to the present with a smile. "I must have a talk with her, straightaway… give her a few bits of advice on being a wife… on handling a husband."

He groaned, leading her on up the steps. "If you do, then it's only fair that I give the duke a few bits of advice about marriage with a LeCoeur female.

LeCoeur women make perfect mistresses, but as wives—"

"Yes?" She raised one eyebrow.

"They far surpass perfection," he murmured smoothly.

"First-rate diplomacy, your lordship." She squeezed his arm and glowed with pleasure. "It is no wonder the prime minister insisted on having you for the Foreign Office."

The nursery was awash in soft evening light and in the giggles of a dark-haired toddler being swung aloft by the ruddy-faced duke, while Rosalind, Lady Beatrice, and the child's nurse looked on anxiously. The women turned to Gabrielle instantly.

"Talk to the man… He's impossible!" Rosalind insisted, pointing at the duke.

"He's getting the child all wrought up," Beatrice declared with crossed arms and a knitted brow. "It will take hours to get him to sleep after such excitement."

"Don't be old sourpusses," the duke declared, lowering the boy and then giving him up to Gabrielle when she reached for him. "A boy has to have a bit of fun now and again. Right, Wills?" His buoyant mood was a fair hint of Rosalind's answer to his proposal.

"Are we to understand that you said yes to the duke," Gabrielle said to her mother as she cuddled her apple-cheeked son.

When Rosalind looked to the duke with her heart in her eyes and nodded, Beatrice realized what had transpired and gasped. After a moment, she settled into a beaming smile. "Well, it's about time the pair of you came to your senses!"

There were hugs and congratulations all around. Then at the nurse's discreet reminder, they passed little William around for good-night hugs.

When Rosalind took too long with her turn, Beatrice complained, "Come, come, Rosalind. Don't be greedy," and reached for the boy.

"Greedy? Who is being greedy?" Rosalind said, turning so that Beatrice couldn't reach him. "You have him every night."

Gabrielle looked to Pierce and nodded. He cleared his throat for attention.

"No need to argue," he announced. "In another six months, there will be two grandchildren—one for each of you to spoil."

They looked to Gabrielle, who colored with pleasure, and Rosalind abruptly surrendered little William to Beatrice so she could hug her daughter instead.

"Another grandchild. How wonderful!" she crooned, glowing with excitement. "I know just what we'll call him:
Lochinvar
."

"Lochinvar?" Beatrice was scandalized. "We'll do no such thing. He'll be called
Horace .
. . after my great uncle, who acquired the family fortune."

Rosalind drew herself up with a daunting look of hauteur.

"Horace is a perfect name—
for a mule
. Gabrielle's child is born of a great love, a burning passion. He deserves a noble, glorious, romantic name—like Lochinvar."

"He deserves a dignified and stately name, not something taken straight from a theater playbill," Beatrice insisted. "Horace."

"Lochinvar!"

"Horace!"

The grandmothers were nose to nose as Pierce and Gabrielle slipped out and closed the door behind them. She paused, looking up at Pierce, her eyes sparkling.

"What
will
we call the baby?"

Pierce pulled her into his arms, feeling a pulse of pure joy flooding his heart.

"Why don't you give it some thought." He gave a wicked laugh. "And then make me a proposition."

^

Author's Note

I hope you enjoyed
The Perfect Mistress
. Though Gabrielle and Pierce and the details of their romance are very much fiction, rest assured that the attitudes, events, and intrigues portrayed here are indeed based in historical fact.

In Victorian thinking, sexual relations between husband and wife, even those required to produce desired children, were considered morally suspect. But the urges for passion and romance remained, and for the upper class, a hidden world devoted to pleasure and passion—the
demimonde
—

became the accepted outlet for the urges of men. (It was the belief of the day that women were not troubled by such urges!) Children, property, and respectability were the province of the wife and marriage, while sex, romance, and love were the sphere of the mistress and liaison. The public line between the two was discreetly and irrevocably drawn.

A wide range of liaisons existed in the demimonde: from brief encounters to long-term partnerships resembling marriages, from impersonal sexual transactions to passionate and enduring relationships. The women of the demiworld, generally termed "courtesans" on the continent and "mistresses"

in Britain, were adept at allurement and persuasion and sometimes wielded great influence through the men they loved. But they also endured tense vigils between their lovers' visits. And they were forced to do whatever was necessary to keep their attractions fresh and their lovers interested… even if that meant sacrificing other ties and relationships.

As sexuality became increasingly repressed, Victorian society came to focus more and more on the illicit expression of sexuality in the culture and on the women who had been marginalized enough to have to resort to it as a means of support. Debate over prostitution became astonishingly public and graphic—affording a repressed society the titillation of reading about and discussing sex at length, couched in the context of deploring the "great social ill" of prostitution. (The safe sex of the 1880s was to talk of prostitution!) People high and low became involved in the discussion and called on the leaders of society and the government to do something about it. Some leaders, like Prime Minister William Gladstone, took the plight of the "fallen woman" so seriously that they personally engaged in rescue work among them.

Shocking as it may sound to us, for most of his adult life—more than forty years—William Gladstone did indeed walk the streets of London and visit brothels and introducing houses, attempting to "rescue" women engaged in prostitution. A true product of his era, Gladstone was a complicated, sexually repressed, and frequently troubled man. From all accounts of his behavior, he seemed to genuinely care about the moral and spiritual redemption of the prostitutes he engaged in conversation. But he also acknowledged in his private writings that his higher motives were tainted by the vicarious sexual thrill he received from his encounters with them. Just as surprising was the extreme patience with which his good wife, Catherine, bore his peculiar avocation. On numerous occasions, he brought young prostitutes home to her to bathe and feed and lodge under their roof.

Only as he aged did she seriously object to his "night walks" and then primarily out of concern for his physical health.

Gladstone's fascination with prostitutes was a public secret that more than once teetered on the edge of becoming a public scandal. In the early 1880s a group of Conservative politicians, led by a Conservative MP named Colonel Tottenham, did indeed set spies on Gladstone, hoping to glean evidence of his having committed sexual indiscretions with prostitutes. To their grave disappointment, they were unable to produce conclusive proof of anything more than poor judgment on the prime minister's part.

Thus… Gabrielle's and Pierce's story could have really happened! Driven into the street by an argument with her mother, a courtesan's daughter truly might have been picked up by the prime minister, then intercepted afterward by one of Tottenham's spies, a nobleman with a well-developed sense of the absurd and a weakness for the smell of biscuits…

I'd like to think that
The Perfect Mistress
may make readers stop to think about our human tendency to judge people and events by their appearance, about the roles society assigns us as men and women, and about the possibilities that could exist if men and women were to become friends as well as marriage partners and lovers.