When Beauty Tamed the Beast

  The man looked up at him as if he had sprouted horns. “Larkspy? What’s a larkspy? I haven’t eaten any of it.”

  Piers straightened up. “He doesn’t know the history of England. He’s better off dead.”

  “Did you ask if he’d eaten any lampreys?” Sandys said. “He hates seafood. Can’t abide eels.”

  “More to the point, he’s deaf as a post. The first King Henry ate lampreys, one of the many mad kings we’ve had in this country, though not as cracked as the current one. Still, Henry was thickheaded enough to have eaten a surfeit of eels and died of it.”

  “I am not deaf!” the patient said. “I can hear as well as the next, if people would just stop mumbling at me. My joints hurt. They’re the problem.”

  “You’re dying, that’s the problem,” Piers pointed out.

  Sandys grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. “Don’t say such a thing in front of my son. He’s no more than thirty-two.”

  “He’s got the body of an eighty-year-old. Has he spent much time consorting with actresses?”

  Sandys snorted. “Certainly not! Our family goes back to—”

  “Nightwalkers? Hussies? Mollishers, mopsies, or mackerels? Though mackerels brings fish back into this conversation and you already told me that the man can’t abide seafood. But what about fish of the female variety?”

  “My son is a member of the Church!” Sandys blustered.

  “That settles it,” Piers said. “Everyone lies, but churchmen make an art of it. He’s got syphilis. Churchmen are riddled with it, and the more pious they are, the more symptoms they have. I should have known the moment I saw that prayer book.”

  “Not my son,” Sandys said, sounding as if he actually believed it. “He’s a man of God. Always has been.”

  “As I was saying—”

  “Seriously.”

  “Hmm. Well, if not a mopsy—”

  “No one,” Sandys said, shaking his head. “He’s never—he’s not interested. He’s like a saint, that boy is. When he was sixteen, I took him to Venus’s Rose, in the Whitefriars, but he didn’t take the slightest interest in any of the girls. Just started praying, and asked them to join him, which they didn’t care for. He’s a candidate for sainthood.”

  “His sainthood is about to become a question for a higher authority. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Sandys grabbed his arm. “You must!”

  “I can’t.”

  “But the other doctors, all of them, they gave him medicines, they said—”

  “They were fools, who didn’t tell you the truth.”

  Sandys swallowed. “He was fine until he was twenty. Just a fine, healthy boy, and then—”

  “Take your son home and let him die in peace. Because die he will, whether I give you a solution of sulfur or not.”

  “Why?” Sandys whispered.

  “He has syphilis. He’s deaf, he’s diarrhetic, he’s jaundiced, he’s got eye and joint inflammation and nosebleeds. He likely gets headaches.”

  “He’s never been with a woman. Ever. I swear it. He hasn’t any sores on his private parts or he would have mentioned it.”

  “He didn’t have to be with a woman,” Piers said, nipping his coat out of Sandys’s hand and shaking his sleeve straight again.

  “How can he have syphilis without—”

  “It could have been a man.”

  Sandys looked so shocked that Piers relented. “Or it could have been you, which is far more likely. The rosy ladies you visited as a youth infected the boy before he was even born.”

  “I was treated with mercury,” Sandys protested.

  “To no avail. You still have it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have important things to do. Like treat a patient who might live for another year.”

  Piers strolled out, finding his butler Prufrock in the hallway. “I wonder how you ever get anything done,” he said to him. “It must be hard to run a household when you have to conduct all your business in the corridors so you can hear every golden word that falls from my lips.”

  “I do not find it a particular problem,” Prufrock said, falling in beside him. “But then I have lots of practice. You don’t think that you were a trifle hard on Lord Sandys?”

  “Hard? Was I hard? Surely not. I told him exactly what was wrong with his son, and what to do next—in short, go home and wait for choirs of angels, because there are no miracles on this side of the divide.”

  “It’s his son that’s dying. And if I got you right, he gave the poor lad the illness. That’s a blow, that is.”

  “My father wouldn’t have minded a bit,” Piers assured him. “If he had another heir, that is. But Sandys has a whole passel of children. An heir and more to spare.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The Church, you fool. He put this boy into the Church and seems to have trained him up to it from an early age, too. The heir must be rousting about in brothels just like good old Pa. Sandys would never have allowed the spare near a Bible if he were, in fact, the heir. This one is expendable, which is a bloody good thing, under the circumstances.”

  “Your father the duke would be greatly disturbed at the very idea that he’d passed on a disease of this nature,” Prufrock said.

  “Perhaps,” Piers said, pretending to consider it. “And perhaps not. I’m amazed my father hasn’t married a fresh young thing of twenty. Or sixteen. Time’s a-wasting, and at this rate he’ll never have the spare he needs.”

  “His Grace was devoted to Her Grace and wounded by the terrible events of the past,” Prufrock said with a palpable lack of attention to the truth.

  Piers didn’t bother answering that. His leg hurt as if someone had stuck a hot poker into his thigh. “I need a drink, so why don’t you rush ahead like a good butler and meet me at the door of the library with a strong brandy?”

  “I’ll keep walking next to you in case you keel over,” Prufrock said.

  “I suppose you have visions of breaking my fall,” Piers said, giving his scrawny butler a sidelong glance.

  “Actually, no. But I would call for a footman, who could drag you along the corridor. It’s marble, so you might get a concussion, and that might make you a bit kinder to your patients, not to mention your staff. You had Betsy in tears again this morning. You seem to think scullery maids grow on trees.”

  Thank God, they were getting close to the library. Piers paused for a moment, the idea of amputation flitting through his mind, and not for the first time. He could get one of those Egyptian bed-things that Cleopatra had herself carried about on. Walking would be a damned sight more difficult, but at least he’d be free of this infernal pain.

  “Your father has written,” Prufrock told him. “I took the liberty of putting the letter on your desk.”

  “Took the liberty of steaming it open, more like,” Piers said. “What does he have to say?”

  “He expresses some interest in your marital future,” Prufrock said cheerfully. “It seems that last missive you sent him, the one listing all your demands for a spouse, did not dissuade him. Rather surprising, I must say.”

  “The one that called him an idiot?” Piers asked. “Did you read that one too, you pestilent polecat?”

  “You’re quite poetical today,” Prufrock observed. “All that alliteration in the service of mopsies and mollishers, and now for your lowly butler. I’m honored, I assure you.”

  “What’s the duke writing about now?” Piers said. He could see the library door. He could almost feel the brandy going down his throat. “I told him that I wouldn’t accept a wife unless she was as beautiful as the sun and the moon. Which is a quote from literature, in case you don’t know. And I added quite a lot of other provisions as well, ones guaranteed to send him into a frothing fit of despair.”

  “He’s looking for a wife,” Prufrock said.

  “For himself, I would hope. Although he’s waited a bit long,” Piers said, failing to summon any particular interest in this news. “Men of his age
don’t have the balls they once had, if you’ll excuse the vulgar truth of it, Prufrock. Lord knows you have more delicate sensibilities than I do.”

  “I used to, before I began working for you,” Prufrock said, pushing open the library door with a flourish.

  Piers had one thing in mind. It was golden, tasted like fire, and would cut the pain in his leg.

  “So he’s looking for a wife,” he repeated without paying any attention to the words, but heading straight for the brandy decanter. He poured out a hefty dose. “It’s been a rotten day. Not that it matters to me, or you, for that matter, but there’s nothing I can do for that young woman who showed up at the back door this morning.”

  “The one who’s all swollen in the belly?”

  “It’s not the usual swelling, and if I cut her open, I’ll kill her. If I don’t cut her open, the disease will kill her. So I took the easier of the two options.” He threw back the brandy.

  “You sent her away?”

  “She had nowhere to go. I turned her over to Nurse Matilda, with instructions to bed her down in the west wing with enough opium to keep her mind off what’s happening next. Thank God this castle is big enough to house half the dying people in England.”

  “Your father,” Prufrock said, “and the question of marriage.”

  He was trying to distract him. Piers poured another glass, smaller this time. He had no wish to stick his head in a bottle of brandy and never come out again, if only because he’d learned from his patients that overindulgence meant that brandy wouldn’t blunt the pain anymore. “Ah, marriage,” he said obediently. “About time. My mother’s been gone these twenty years. Well, gone isn’t quite the word, is it? At any rate, darling Maman is over on the Continent living the good life, so His Grace might as well remarry. It wasn’t easy to get that divorce, you know. Probably cost him as much as a small estate. He should make hay while the sun shines, or in short, while he’s still able to get a rise every other day.”

  “Your father’s not getting married,” Prufrock said. Something in his tone made Piers glance up.

  “You weren’t joking.”

  The butler nodded. “It is my impression that His Grace sees you—or your marriage—as a challenge. It could be that you shouldn’t have listed quite so many requirements. One might say that it fired up the duke’s resolve. Got him interested in the project, so to speak.”

  “The devil you say. He’ll never manage to find anyone. I have a reputation, you know.”

  “Your title is weightier than your reputation,” Prufrock said. “Additionally, there is the small matter of your father’s estate.”

  “You’re probably right, damn you.” Piers decided he could manage another small glass. “But what about my injury, hmm? You think a woman would agree to marry a man—what am I saying? Of course a woman would agree to that.”

  “I doubt many young ladies would see that as an insurmountable problem,” Prufrock said. “Now, your personality . . .”

  “Damn you,” Piers said, but without heat.

  Chapter Three

  The moment Linnet returned to the drawing room, her father groaned aloud. “I turned down three marriage proposals for you last month, and I can tell you right now that I’ll never receive another one. Hell, I wouldn’t believe you a maiden myself. You look four or five months along.”

  Linnet sat down rather heavily, her skirts floating up like a white cloud and then settling around her. “I’m not,” she said. “I am not pregnant.” She was starting to feel almost as if she truly were carrying a child.

  “Ladies don’t use that word,” Lord Sundon said. “Didn’t you learn anything from that governess of yours?” He waved his quizzing glass in the air the better to illustrate his point. “One might refer to a delicate condition, or perhaps to being enceinte. Never to pregnancy, a harsh word with harsh connotations. The pleasure, the joy of being of our rank, is that we may overlook the earthy, the fertile, the . . .”

  Linnet stopped listening. Her father was a vision in pale blue, his waistcoat fastened with silver buttons inset with ivory poppies, his Prussian collar a miracle of elegance. He was very good at overlooking anything earthy, but she’d never been as successful.

  At that moment a long banging sounded at the door. Despite herself, Linnet looked up hopefully when their butler entered to announce the visitor. Surely Prince Augustus had rethought. How could he sit in his castle, knowing that she was being rejected by the ton? He must have heard about the disastrous events of the ball, the way no one had spoken to her after he left.

  Of course, the prince had taken himself away while the news was still spreading through the ballroom. He had walked out the door with his cronies without a backward glance at her . . . and after that every face in the ballroom turned away from her. Apparently they were only waiting to see what his reaction was to being told she was carrying a child.

  Yet he, if anyone, knew it to be a taradiddle. At least, he knew the child wasn’t his. Maybe that was why he threw her over so abruptly. Perhaps he too believed the stories and thought she was pregnant by another man.

  The cut direct from an entire ballroom. It had to be a first.

  The caller wasn’t Prince Augustus, but Linnet’s aunt, Lady Etheridge, known to her intimates as Zenobia. She had chosen that name for herself, realizing as a young girl that Hortense didn’t suit her personality.

  “I knew this would come to grief,” she announced, stopping just inside the door and dropping her gloves to the floor rather than handing them to the footman to her right.

  Zenobia relished a good drama, and when inebriated was prone to informing a whole dinner table that she could have played Lady Macbeth better than Sarah Siddons. “I told you once, if I told you a hundred times, Cornelius, that girl is too pretty for her own good. And I was right. Here she is, enceinte, and all of London party to the news except for me.”

  “I’m not—” Linnet said.

  But she was drowned out by her father, who chose to avoid the question at hand and go on the attack. “It’s not my daughter’s fault that she takes after her mother.”

  “My sister was as pure as the driven snow,” Zenobia bellowed back.

  The battle was properly engaged now, and there would be no stopping it.

  “My wife may have been snowy—and God knows I’m the one to speak to that—but she was certainly warm enough when she cared to be. We all know how fast the Ice Maiden could warm up, particularly when she was around royalty, now I think of it!”

  “Rosalyn deserved a king,” Zenobia screamed. She strode into the room and planted herself as if she were about to shoot an arrow. Linnet recognized the stance: it was just what Mrs. Siddons had done the week before on the Covent Garden stage, when her Desdemona repudiated Othello’s cruel accusations of unfaithfulness.

  Poor Papa was hardly a warrior like Othello, though. The fact was that her dearest mama had been rampantly unfaithful to him, and he knew it. And so did Aunt Zenobia, though she was choosing to play ignorant.

  “I really don’t see that the question is relevant,” Linnet put in. “Mama died some years ago now, and her fondness for royalty is neither here nor there.”

  Her aunt threw her a swooning look. “I will always defend your mother, though she lies in the cold, cold grave.”

  Linnet slumped back in her corner. True, her mother was in the grave. And frankly, she thought she missed her mother more than Zenobia did, given that the sisters had fought bitterly every time they met. Mostly over men, it had to be admitted. Though to her credit, her aunt wasn’t nearly as trollopy as her mama had been.

  “It’s the beauty,” her father was saying. “It’s gone to Linnet’s head, just as it went to Rosalyn’s. My wife thought beauty gave her license to do whatever she liked—”

  “Rosalyn never did anything untoward!” Zenobia interrupted.

  “She skirted respectability for years,” Lord Sundon continued, raising his voice. “And now her daughter has followed in her foot
steps, and Linnet is ruined. Ruined!”

  Zenobia opened her mouth—and then snapped it shut. There was a pause. “Rosalyn is hardly the question here,” she said finally, patting her hair. “We must concentrate on dear Linnet now. Stand up, dear.”

  Linnet stood up.

  “Five months, I’d say,” Zenobia stated. “How on earth you managed to hide that from me, I don’t know. Why, I was as shocked as anyone last night. The Countess of Derby was quite sharp with me, thinking I’d been concealing it. I had to admit that I knew nothing of it, and I’m not entirely sure she believed me.”

  “I am not carrying a child,” Linnet said, enunciating the words slowly.

  “She said the same last night,” her father confirmed. “And earlier this morning, she didn’t look it.” But he peered at her waist. “Now she does.”

  Linnet pushed down the cloth that billowed out just under her breasts. “See, I’m not enceinte. There’s nothing there but cloth.”

  “My dear, you’ll have to tell us sometime,” Zenobia said, taking out a tiny mirror and peering at herself. “It’s not as if it’s going anywhere. At this rate, you’ll be bigger than a house in a matter of a few months. I myself retired to the country as soon as my waistline expanded even a trifle.”

  “What are we going to do with her?” her father moaned, collapsing into a chair as suddenly as a puppet with cut strings.

  “Nothing you can do,” Zenobia said, powdering her nose. “No one wants a cuckoo in the nest. You’ll have to send her abroad and see if she can catch someone there, after all this unpleasantness is over, of course. You’d better double her dowry. Thankfully, she’s an heiress. Someone will take her on.”

  She put down her powder puff and shook her finger at Linnet. “Your mother would be very disappointed, my dear. Didn’t she teach you anything?”

  “I suppose you mean that Rosalyn should have trained her in the arts of being as dissipated as she herself was,” her father retorted. But he was still drooping in his seat, and had obviously lost his fire.

  “I did not sleep with the prince,” Linnet said, as clearly and as loudly as she could. “I might have done so, obviously. Perhaps if I had, he would have felt constrained to marry me now. But I chose not to.”