Duchess By Night

Page 13

“Eunuch?” Harriet said, before she realized what Isidore was talking about.
Isidore gave her a wry smile. “The truth is that you are far more innocent than I am, Harriet.”
“Perhaps about some things, but I know marriage. I understand it. Unfair though it may be, your husband will be sorely disappointed if he finds you are not a virgin.”
“If he interrupts his travels long enough to return and discover the state of my body,” Isidore pointed out. “At this rate I’ll be a withered virgin of eighty.”
Harriet shook her head. “I think your instinct is right, and the dowager duchess will force her son to return. But in the longer sense, what you really want is a successful marriage. Chastity is a very good way to start it on the right foot.”
“No one is chaste in their marriages these days,” Isidore said. “Look at Jemma.”
“Jemma was entirely faithful to Beaumont until she interrupted him making love to his mistress. And I believe she was chaste for years when she first moved to Paris, and was waiting for him to fetch her.”
“But he didn’t fetch her, did he? She was his virgin bride, and he didn’t give a damn. Which just shows that your rosy idea of marriage is far from the reality of things.”
Harriet didn’t think anyone who had survived her own particular marriage could have a rosy view. “Jemma gave it her best possible try. If you come to the marriage with experience, you risk not having a chance at success. And then you might wish that you had.”
“It depends on how you classify success,” Isidore said. “I define a successful marriage as one in which people live together without too much acrimony, long enough to have children. I would like that. A successful marriage is not necessarily one in which there is no scandal. I would judge Beaumont and Jemma to have a very successful marriage, for instance, although she disappoints me.”
“How so?”
Isidore’s lip curled. “I didn’t want to tell her, but it’s paltry the way she has bowed to her husband’s demands. If she wants to play chess with Strange, she should have accompanied us. I am not one to accede to foolish commands.”
Harriet looked up at the ceiling. It was impossible to explain the dance of will and compromise that had been her experience of marriage.
“Was your marriage a success?” Isidore asked, uncannily echoing Harriet’s own thoughts.
Isidore’s maid, Lucille, pushed open the door. “I need to get you into pantaloons for this evening, Your Grace,” she said, looking faintly harassed. “Mr. Finchley, the duke’s valet, has given me a list of what you should wear. He’ll be stopping by later to arrange your cravat.”
“I can’t wait to see you!” Isidore said, nipping back into her own chamber. Leaving Harriet with her question. Was your marriage a success?
She and Benjamin had no children. Her mother-in-law saw it as a utter failure on those grounds alone.
Then her husband committed suicide. That fact would make most of London unhesitatingly condemn her marriage as a failure. Surely a good wife, a beloved wife, would be enough to keep a man from shooting himself.
But…
Life was so much more complex than markers of that type. Was your marriage a success?
“Yes,” she whispered to the empty air.
I loved Benjamin. And he loved me.
He didn’t love me enough to live. But he loved me. Surely that was the definition of marital success?
Chapter Nine
Of Mathematical Angles and Men in Flesh-colored Silk
J em was unable to focus on his structural drawings when he returned to his study, and so spent a grueling three hours with one of his secretaries, the one in charge of foreign investments. He agreed to sell a grove of Italian olive trees, confirmed the purchase of two Flemish brigantines (to be used to haul cotton from the East Indies to his cotton mills), signed a sharp letter addressed to the House of Lords complaining of increasing privateer action, and approved expenditures of twelve hundred pounds in the next year towards armor-plating his trading vessels.
He finally retreated to his chamber with a headache. After a quick bath, he pulled on some clothing and went to the nursery.
The west wing of the house was, as always, locked away from the greater house. At two o’clock every afternoon, all doors leading that wing were locked and guarded, forestalling the possibility that a drunken guest might wander toward the nursery in a state of disarray or worse.
As he approached, the footman standing at the door bowed and unlocked the door. He nodded at him, and then remembered Eugenia’s comment. Did he really not observe people? The footman had a rather shaggy peruke, a bovine look, sweet eyes.
“Is your name Roberts?” he asked, knowing it wasn’t.
“James, my lord.”
“James,” he said, committing it to memory. James: the bovine footman with the bedraggled peruke.
Eugenia was sitting in front of the fire, skirts spread out on all sides. “May I come downstairs?” she asked, jumping to her feet. “Look, Papa!”
“No,” he said automatically, coming over to look. “What are you drawing?”
“I’m ciphering,” Eugenia said. “It’s so much fun, Papa. I learned it in this book. If you take an angle here, and add that outside one together, and divide it by this, it ends up at 360. And it does that over and over. Isn’t that fascinating? I’m trying to figure out what else comes to 360.”
Jem squatted down. She was working on the same angles he’d been playing with as bridge supports. “It’s very interesting,” he told her. “Here’s another fun thing. You take a five-sided shape.” He quickly drew it on her foolscap. “Now extend all the angles. What do you think the sum of all five of these outside angles will be?”
“360?”
“Good guess. Try it out and see.”
She bent her head over the paper, clumsily moving the brass protractor into place.
Jem made a mental note to have a protractor made to her measure. “Where’s your governess, sweetheart?”
“I told her she could go have her supper downstairs,” Eugenia said absently. “She doesn’t like angles. She’ll be back upstairs in a while. She’s reading me Chapman’s Homer.”
“The Iliad?”
“We finished that. It’s the Odyssey, and I like it much better.”
“You are frightening sometimes, Eugenia. Do you know that?”
“Well, you say so, Papa,” Eugenia replied, with complete unconcern in her voice.
He walked out wondering, once again, whether he ought to have—or ought to now—provide a playmate for his daughter. She never showed any signs of loneliness, but surely children were supposed to play, not sit around splicing angles for fun. But then, she seemed happy.
And, in truth, providing a playmate, an appropriate playmate, would mean sending Eugenia away, to school or to a relative. Parents of a properly brought up little gentlewoman would never allow their daughter to visit Fonthill.
The idea of sending her away was impossible, and he shook it off. Still…it was a nagging thought. Eugenia was the dearest person in the world to him. Why was he raising her here? A better man would turn himself into a model of ethical standards, dismiss all his guests and half of the servants, and replace them with puritanical types with pinched noses and pure souls.