The Taming of the Duke

Page 45

Josie looked at her, unconvinced. "Are you setting up Rafe's illegitimate brother as your cicisbeo? Like Mayne?"
"Absolutely not!" Imogen said with dignity. "It's an entirely different situation."
"What's different about it?" Josie said, looking intently interested.
Josie had such expressive eyes and lovely eyebrows; like a stroke of lightning, Imogen knew what had happened.
"Someone said something unkind about your figure, didn't they?"
Josie had been laughing, but the joy drained right out of her eyes. "Certainly not!" But she said it too hastily.
"I'll travel to the Highlands and send whoever it was on a long carriage ride with Griselda."
Josie managed a wobbly smile. "That was one wonderful thing about my return trip. Miss Flecknoe's stomach is made of iron. She sat opposite me and read improving tracts aloud for hours without turning the faintest shade of green."
"Tell me," Imogen said.
"I don't want to."
"If you don't, I'll write a note to Tess and ask her to come for a visit. And you know that Tess will have the truth in five minutes."
Tess was their eldest sister, and since she had practically raised them, she had perfected all kinds of examination techniques. "I would be worried, if I didn't know that Tess was traveling on the Continent with her husband," Josie pointed out. But then she relented. "It wasn't so bad. Really, it was almost a compliment."
"You disliked this compliment so much that you fled Scotland?"
"Yes," Josie whispered.
Imogen tightened her arms around her little sister. "Humiliation is a universal condition. My only consolation is that I will likely never again make such an ass of myself as I made over Draven."
"I'll never have the chance to make a fool of myself over a man."
"Yes, you will."
"Men will never even consider me, so I shan't have to worry about embarrassing myself."
"Who said what?" Imogen asked. "A carriage trip with Griselda may be too good for them."
"They didn't say anything to me," Josie said wearily. "It was people who live next to Ewan. The Crogans."
"You mean the men who tried to feather Annabel? Why in heaven's name would you pay any attention to what those fools said?"
"Because they were saying what everyone else thinks," Josie said. "I didn't mean to overhear them."
"Perhaps they meant you to overhear."
"No. I was hidden behind an oak tree." Josie sniffed.
Imogen kissed her on the forehead.
Then it all rushed out. "The older one tried to get his brother to marry me. Except he didn't want to, because he said I was a prime Scottish hoglet. And then the older one said he'd love to snuffle around my skirts. But the younger one said that his brother could snuffle all he wanted, but when a girl is as fat as—as I am, she's going to turn into a proper sow. A—a sow't"
"They're cruel drunkards," Imogen said, stroking Josie's hair and wishing that she had the Crogans within the sights of a hunting rifle. "I think you're right in that the older one might have been attempting a compliment. I wish that men didn't think that snuffling was a compliment, but they do think that way."
"They spoke about me as if I were disgusting, as if—as if I was incontinent or something. That's how they talked about it. The older one said that at least I would never cuckold my husband, because—" Her voice broke again.
"You could cuckold anyone you pleased," Imogen said, resting her chin on Josie's soft hair and stroking her shaking back, "although I hope you never do."
"He said I would never cuckold anyone because all my husband would have to do is give me enough bacon and I'd be happy." She lost her voice for a few moments.
"That was cruel, and they are both horrible, horrible people," Imogen said with conviction.
"The worst of it was that the next morning the younger Crogan showed up and started to court me!" Josie said in a wail. "He brought me flowers, and he smiled at me, just as if he didn't think I was a great fat sow. It was—it was awful!"
Imogen narrowed her eyes. "You should have spoken to Annabel. Ewan would have killed him for the impudence of it."
"What would be the point? They knew he was courting me for my dowry. She and Ewan thought it was funny that the Crogans were so hopeful."
"So what did you do?"
Josie sniffed.
"I know you," Imogen observed. "I've known you for your whole life. I don't believe for a moment that you simply allowed this Crogan to court you, without saying a word to him about his true intentions."
"I didn't do anything the first time he came. I was so shocked that he would attempt it, after those things he said about me. But he acted as if he'd never said them."
"Horrible."
"A few days later he asked if I wished to attend an assembly. Annabel told him immediately that an assembly was out of the question because I hadn't been formally introduced to society. So he showed up the next evening with some sort of musical instrument."
"Oh, no!"
"Apparently he sang for hours before anyone noticed him. He had hoisted himself up onto the tree outside Annabel's chambers, rather than mine, and it's impossible to wake her up these days."
Imogen was laughing so hard that she was clutching her stomach.
"When Ewan came to bed, at first he had no idea what the noise was, and then he realized that it was a scratchy version of 'Will Ye Go Lassie, Go.' "
"Were you being courted by the short, roundish Cro-gan or the tall, thin one?"
"The short one. The tall one is the older brother, and he's already married."
"What happened next?" Imogen asked, catching her breath.
"Well, a few days after that he came bringing a poem he'd written about my eyes. It was rather short."
"You did keep a copy, didn't you?" Imogen implored, starting to laugh again.
"Naturally," Josie said with dignity. "It might be my only love poem, so naturally I entered it in my book. But I have it memorized. Wait a minute…" She struck a declamatory pose.
Her eyes they shone like diamonds, You'd think she was queen of the land And her hair it hung over her shoulders Tied up with a black velvet band.
"What next?" Annabel said after a moment.
"That was all."
"When did you tie up your hair with a black velvet band?"
"I think," Josie said thoughtfully, "that he might have run out of room on his sheet of paper."
"It's surprisingly good."
"Yes, Ewan said it's a well-known song that his grandmother loves."
"So a borrowed love song…"
"And an enforced suitor. It just made me so angry. What if I had believed him? What if I had thought that poem was his, and his feelings were genuine?"
"And now we come to the heart of it. What did you do to that man?"
"I dosed him," Josie said. There was satisfaction in her voice and her eyes were—indeed—gleaming like diamonds.