Duchess By Night

Page 42

“I’m such a bumbling fool. I just thought I was keeping her safe!”
Harriet couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like to have a child,” he said, falling into the armchair where she’d slept part of the night. “When her mother died, I thought I’d put her out to a wet nurse and then send her away to some female relative somewhere. That made sense, didn’t it?”
Harriet nodded.
“But then I picked her up and she had this odd face, with all that corkscrew hair going on—” He stopped. “You look a bit like her. I couldn’t send her away. I had the wet nurse here. Later I should have sent her to Sally’s aunt, where she’d be safe and with other women, but I couldn’t. Idiot!” he cried, clutching his head.
“It’s not that terrible,” Harriet said, speaking against every instinct she had. She simply couldn’t bear the bleak look on his face.
“I know what I have to do. She must go live somewhere else, away from this place and its dangers.”
Harriet cleared her throat. “Couldn’t you be less drastic? Why not simply invite people whom you trust to the house so that you can unlock the nursery wing? And get rid of the rats. It seems simple to me.”
“Simple! You don’t know how easy death is. It’s—it’s like a door. A person simply walks through it, and she’s lost to you forever.”
“As it happens, I have lost someone very dear to me,” she said. “But I did my best to keep him safe.”
“As I am doing!”
“By inviting her for picnics in that leaning tower?” she burst out. “By filling your house with people whom you yourself don’t trust not to be dangerous? By locking her in, and not even bothering to check on her before you go to bed?”
“I didn’t go to bed,” he said. His voice grated. “You’re right about everything else.”
“The fact that you didn’t go to bed is just part and parcel of the truth of it,” she said. “Perhaps you should send her away. A father who spends the night gallivanting rather than bothering to check on his daughter obviously has no time for her.”
He put his head back in his hands. She felt that alarming sweep of vertigo again, as if she would do anything to make him stop looking so stricken.
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
“I—”
“I’m a terrible father. My father was no father at all, but I thought I could improve on the model.” He straightened up again and his face shocked her, with such black shadows under his eyes that it looked as if he’d been punched. “Hubris. I should have known. Men in my family can’t be decent parents.”
“Why?” she said sharply. “And I don’t think you’re a terrible father. You simply need to be less careless.”
“We’re a disreputable bunch. Villiers did you no great service by bringing you here. I’ll have to send her away.” His voice was as bleak as midwinter.
Harriet swallowed. “She loves you,” she said, faintly. “Don’t send her away. Just change your life.”
“I let her be bit by a rat,” he said, turning around again. “This house is, metaphorically at least, full of rats. And I, like they, have no idea how to turn into a more civilized version of myself. I am no quiet country squire, Harry Cope.” Then: “Is it rage that makes your eyes that color?”
“Anger has no particular color,” Harriet said. She was trying to work through what he just said. Could it be that Jem allowed this house party to continue because he considered himself reprehensible? Flawed beyond the ability to change?
“Your eyes are the most peculiar color,” he said. “Sometimes they’re brown, and sometimes they take on a violet tinge. When you disapprove of something they—what am I saying?”
Harriet was wondering the same thing. What sort of man stayed up all night making love to his mistress and then praised a man’s eyes?
He turned away again and gently pulled the coverlet from Eugenia.
“Don’t you wish to leave your daughter here until she wakes up? I can go to another bedchamber,” Harriet said. “She’s so exhausted.”
“So are you. I’ll take her with me,” he said, and scooped Eugenia into his arms. She murmured something and turned her face against his chest. Her long thin legs fell from his arms like a crane’s legs.
“We owe you huge thanks,” he said.
“You owe me nothing.”
“If nothing else, another lesson at the rapier.” His eyes swept around the room, seeing the rapier cast to the side, the rug bundled away.
“I find I love the sport,” Harriet admitted.
“In the afternoon. You have to sleep.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Lay Me Down and Roll Me to a Whore. Or Not.
February 8, 1784
S he woke without finding Jem standing over her, for a change. The room was utterly silent except for the song of a bird on the branch outside her window. Then there was a rustle of paper and she raised her head to see Isidore sitting by the fire, reading a book.
She sat up and stretched.
Isidore glanced over and said, “You will likely shriek when you see your hair; I’m just warning you.”
“I’ve lived with this hair my whole life. My maid tames it by binding it back when it’s wet.”
“It seems you had an exciting night,” Isidore said, putting her book aside. “Will you please tell me what happened? I’ve heard of an invasion of rats and a fire and a missing host. It sounds like a bad play. Except for the rat part. That has a dismaying touch of reality to it.”
“There was a rat, in Strange’s daughter’s bedchamber.”
“Ugh,” Isidore said. “I can’t abide rats. I stayed in an inn that was infested with them. We were eating dinner and then realized that three or four of them were dancing under the table nearby. They weren’t in the least afraid of us.”
“I thought there was a fire, but there wasn’t. And Lord Strange couldn’t be located. He wasn’t in his bed.” The words made Harriet’s chest feel hard, as if it was filled with small, hard stones.
“I wonder who he’s bedding,” Isidore said. “I suppose he has a mistress. There are a great many women here, you know. I keep encountering women in the ladies’ salon whom I never saw before.”
Harriet didn’t say anything. It was horrifying to discover that she still wanted Jem, even knowing that he had a lover.
“You are an odd female,” Isidore said rather obscurely, picking up her book again.
“What are you reading?”
“Machiavelli’s little book called The Prince. It’s all about how Italian princes keep their power. My mother said that a distant relative is mentioned in here somewhere, and so I thought I would read it.”
“Was your relative a prince?”
“No, as I understand it, he was an underling with a sideline in poisons,” Isidore said. “My family is full of people with various talents.”
“My family is full of people of tedious virtue.”
Isidore turned a page in her book, but looked up. “Tedious virtue?”