The Ugly Duchess

Page 16

“I thought ships were generally named after women,” Theo said.
“His Grace named the vessel after himself. With fines,” Mr. Reede said, moving smoothly on, “the duties attached to the Percival added up to eight thousand pounds. We secured payment and the ship is no longer impounded. His Grace had continued to pay the crew’s wages, but the captain left for a better post.” Mr. Reede turned over a page in his ledger.
“We’re up to forty-five thousand pounds in debt,” Theo said. “That really is rather a lot.”
“There is a small firm of weavers located in Cheapside,” Mr. Reede said. “Ryburn Weavers has made a steady profit of around three thousand pounds per annum.”
“Why didn’t the duke sell it?”
“I believe he forgot about its existence,” Mr. Reede said, adding rather hesitantly, “I used the income to pay for the staff wages in the various houses, as well as the crew of the Percival.”
“So naturally you did not remind him of the existence of the weavers,” Theo said admiringly. “That was exceptionally shrewd of you. Thank you, Mr. Reede.”
She elbowed James, and he muttered something. But he started up from the table as if he could no longer bear to sit, and began ranging about the room, running his hands through his hair.
Theo ignored him for the time being and turned back to Mr. Reede. “My preference would be to pay down the debt from my dowry, and then work toward a goal of making the estate self-sustaining. Is that possible, in your estimation?”
“I have often thought,” Reede offered, “if a reasonable investment were made in the sheep farm, we could bring the income up twenty percent within a short period of time, say two to three years.”
“I would be more comfortable if we received income from various sources. One thing that Lord Islay and I discussed in the past was the possibility of building a ceramics business. Wedgwood has had remarkable success using Staffordshire clay, and half our estate seems to be clay. I find Wedgwood’s patterns stultifyingly boring. I’m sure that we could do better.”
“It would take a considerable outlay to establish a profitable concern. My guess is that you would have to try to lure someone away from Wedgwood.” Mr. Reede cast a nervous glance at James, who was staring out the window, his shoulders tight.
“I’ll explain any plans we might make to my husband,” Theo said.
“Just do whatever you want,” James said, not turning to face them. “I’m useless at this stage.” He had never been happy with facts and figures, but once they were tramping around the estate, he would probably have a hundred ideas about how to increase the wheat harvest.
And once they got the ceramics business up and running, Theo had no doubt that he could handle any contingency. He had a true gift for talking to laborers, likely because he envied their lot.
“What do you think about the idea of establishing a ceramics industry on the estate, Mr. Reede?”
The estate manager glanced over his shoulder again. James had one arm up against the window, and he was leaning his forehead against it, the very portrait of despair. “In conjunction with improvements to the sheep farm, I think that would serve very well indeed, my lady.”
Nine
By the time the meeting was drawing to a close, James felt like jumping out the library window and running into the street, screaming. He was an idiot who would never be able to manage his own estate because he couldn’t bear thinking or talking about numbers. As Reede prosed on, his entire body tensed with the fervent wish to get the hell out of the library.
So it had been Daisy—Daisy, whom he had betrayed—who spent two hours going over figures, coming up with idea after idea to repair their finances. At one point he had sat down at the table again, but the numbers had flowed past him as relentlessly as when he paced the room.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t do mathematics or accounting; he’d learned both in school. But his concentration constantly slipped in the face of such calculations, and he found himself thinking not about selling horses for profit but about the ways he planned to repair the stables. Daisy and Reede talked about the tons of hay produced by the south field compared to the west, and whether the disparity had to do with runoff from the stream; his only contribution was the comment that scything the west field was difficult because it was on the slope of a hill.
He knew that only because he had joined the workers on the estate the previous summer, reveling in the simplicity of learning to lean into the sweep of the scythe, the pleasure of a day spent doing physical labor, even the ache of his muscles at bedtime.
The truth of it was that he was a fool who was really only good for scything, because if he didn’t get into the fresh air and exercise hard every day, he couldn’t control his bloody, bloody temper. And he’d be damned if he ended up endangering his household with airborne china statuettes.
Even so, he could have lived with the brutal truth of his own ineptitude. After all, Daisy—Theo—had made fun of him for years, and her cheerful affection had always smoothed over the fact that he would rather hang himself than attend an opera.
The only time he had sat still long enough to listen to a book being read aloud (let alone read one to himself) was during the bout of ophthalmia, when the doctors banished him to a dark room, threatening that he’d go blind. Even then, he suspected that he would have been up and running about, and be damned with his eyesight, except that Daisy made him laugh, and petted him, and fed him. When Daisy read him Shakespeare, he was fascinated. When he tried to read it to himself, the words jumbled on the page and his mind slipped off to other things.
Finally all the bookkeeping and talking and planning were over, and Daisy said good-bye to Mr. Reede in the prettiest manner possible, James grimly standing at her side in the entryway. Then she pulled him back into the library.
“What?” he said flatly. “I must go for a ride, Daisy. I didn’t have time earlier, and my head is pounding.” He still couldn’t believe that he had a wife. Let alone that the wife was Daisy. His Daisy. He reached out and ran a finger down her face. “You have the most beautiful bones of any woman I’ve ever seen. Like a Russian princess, I think.”
She liked that; he could read it in her eyes. “Kiss me,” she said. “That kind of kiss.”
He kissed her.
The damned thing about it was that James had discovered that he actually meant all those things he had said in front of the Prince of Wales that night back in March. Daisy was his, and he was possessive, and he did want her more than anything or anyone in the world.
But now it would never be pure or true between them. And so he kissed her with such a mixture of lust and despair that he fancied he could taste his own misery, so he tore himself away with a muttered comment about his headache.
After riding his horse too fast—which took care of his headache, but not his heartache—he had luncheon in his club and then returned to the house. But rather than enter that blasted library, he fell onto his bed, staring up at the canopy, unable to think or move or even sleep.
His valet, Bairley, appeared after a few hours and inquired about supper. Apparently her ladyship was paying a visit to a modiste and had not yet returned.
“Later,” James said dully. He was in the grip of the kind of guilt and despair that murderers presumably feel. More than anything, he longed to knock his father against the wall with a leveler to the jaw: for ruining his marriage, his love for Daisy, his future. His whole body vibrated with hatred for the man who had so selfishly and carelessly ruined their lives.