Desperate Duchesses

Page 3

“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 selling briskly in Humphrey’s Print Shop.
“My conscience is clear!” her father bellowed, 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 folly. 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 Villiers, 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 filled with Mrs. Parthnell’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 Villiers had likely never heard of John Donne and probably couldn’t tell a roundelay from a rickshaw.
He was perfect.
Chapter 1
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 intelligent 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 all, 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 shall make a decision about the centerpiece for tomorrow’s fête.”
“Fowle tells me that we are holding a ball.” 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 well enough.
“Dear me, don’t tell 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 all 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 tell you that,” her brother put in. “You’d better watch out, Sis. You’re not used to sharing a household.”
“It was truly ill-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 all over with forget-me-nots. Her bodice caressed every curve of her breasts and narrow waist before the skirts billowed over her panniers.
By all rights, the way her side hoops concealed the swell 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 shall 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.
From the corner of his eye, Elijah noticed that Corbin didn’t even blink at the idea he had just been invited by a duke to do his husbandly duty. Perhaps the man could keep Jemma occupied enough that she wouldn’t cause too many scandals before parliament went into recess. He turned sharply toward the door, annoyed to discover that his wife’s beauty seemed more potent in his own house than it had been in Paris during his rare visits.
Partly it was because Jemma had not powdered her hair. She knew quite well that the shimmer of weathered gold was far more enticing than powder, and contrasted better with her blue eyes. It was only—he told himself—because she was his wife that he felt this prickling irritation at her beauty. Or perhaps the irritation was caused by her self-possession. When they first married, she wasn’t so flawless. Now everything about her was polished to perfection, from the color of her lip to the witty edge of her comments.