Desperate Duchesses

  “We were a long way from that!” she said.

  “Not so very far. Trust me.”

  She concentrated on repositioning a spray of apple blossoms that was hanging drunkenly over her ear. That ache low in her belly told her that he was right. He leaned close to her ear.

  “You know how we watched that couple?” he said to her.

  She nodded and repressed a shiver.

  “It’s possible to watch oneself make love in a glass,” he said.

  Rosy color flooded her cheeks. “I declare that you have made it your pleasure to shock me this evening!” she said, taking as sophisticated a tone as she could muster.

  He met her eyes and her next sentence died on her lips. Still watching her, he bent his head and kissed her neck.

  She shivered in his hands, as if she were a newborn bird fallen from its nest.

  Then he held out his arm, and they left the room.

  Chapter 12

  It wasn’t until nearly morning that Roberta was able to pull Jemma into the ladies’ retiring room. “Playing a simpering fool definitely won’t win Villiers,” she told her.

  “We know that. But you did a magnificent job of it tonight,” Jemma said. “Everyone has told me how sweet you are. And most of them added the pious wish that I not corrupt you.”

  Roberta smiled at that. “Since seduction will be ineffective, I’m going to have to trick him into marriage.”

  Jemma looked thoughtful. “You think so?”

  “Absolutely. He’s all of what—how old is he?”

  “Not so very old,” Jemma said. “He and Beaumont were boyhood friends, as I understand.”

  “And now they don’t speak?”

  “Rarely. They did exchange a few words tonight. I suspect they have little in common by now.”

  “Well, how old is your husband?”

  Jemma looked blank. “Thirty-three,” she finally decided. “It must be in our marriage lines, I suppose. We were engaged when I was the tender age of two, and I think he was seven.”

  “So Villiers is likely thirty-three as well.” A very nicely preserved thirty-three, Roberta thought to herself. She felt a pulse of longing. “I’ll have to attend any ball where he might be.”

  “We can always bribe one of his footmen, you know.”

  “A pleasant thought, but I might end up with a child and no marriage,” she said dubiously.

  “Did you think I was suggesting we bribe the footman to give you entry to his chamber?”

  And at Roberta’s nod, “You’re more likely to corrupt me,” Jemma said, laughing. “You aren’t much of an innocent, are you?”

  “Not particularly,” Roberta said, with a helpless shrug.

  “We’ll bribe a footman to let us know which invitations he accepts,” Jemma explained. “The more important question is how to trick him. You can’t simply—”

  “I know,” Roberta interrupted. “He spurned a lady carrying his child so that would be ineffective.”

  “Though Damon would likely challenge him for you,” Jemma said. “I probably do not need to mention this to you, Roberta, but you have noticed how my brother is looking at you, haven’t you?”

  “He has been all that’s kind.”

  “I’m sure,” his sister said. “But…” Her voice trailed off.

  “In fact, we had a discussion about Villiers,” Roberta said. “He fully shares my opinion that Villiers must be tricked. And it was he who warned me about Villiers’s refusal to marry the lady carrying his baby.”

  “Oh, in that case…I must be mistaken,” Jemma said.

  “I don’t know Damon as well as I used to. He visited me often in Paris, far more than my husband, but still, one’s siblings grow up and change, don’t you think?”

  Having never had a sibling, Roberta didn’t venture to comment.

  “As I said, the important question is how to trick Villiers in such a way that he cannot back out. He cares nothing for scandal. In truth, I think the only way for him to marry would be if you simply married him, if that makes sense.”

  “How so?” Roberta asked.

  “Well, we know he’s not going to marry under his own aegis. And yet he’s famous for breaking every sort of law of decency and morality in order to get his own way with a woman. Did Damon tell you what Lady Caroline said after it all came out about the child?”

  Roberta shook her head.

  “She maintained that Villiers had married her in secret, a sort of Fleet Street marriage. But it seems that the marriage certificate was false, because her father would have forced him to acknowledge the marriage if it were all true.”

  It was rather depressing to think of her future husband’s unethical behavior. “If the wedding certificate were false, wouldn’t her father have done something about that?”

  “What could he do, other than challenge Villiers to a duel?”

  “He could have done that! My father would have—” The mind boggled thinking what Roberta’s father would have done. It would have been violent and noisy.

  “Women are invariably more decisive than are men,” Jemma said, yawning. “I think we should sleep on the possibilities.”

  “I don’t understand how he got away with it,” Roberta said.

  “He doesn’t give a damn.”

  “What?”

  “I expect he got away with it because he really doesn’t give a damn what society thinks. The only thing he cares about is chess, and Roberta, you really ought to think about that. I’m not as obsessed as Villiers, and yet when we first married Beaumont loathed the fact that I thought about chess far more than I thought about him. Or listened to him. Villiers will be just the same.”

  “If I were Lady Caroline’s father…”

  “What could he do? Villiers is an excellent swordsman. Almost all chess players are. If there’s one thing a chess player can do, it’s master a game of strategy.”

  “Then you are my secret weapon,” Roberta said.

  Jemma blinked.

  “I suspect that you are a better chess player than Villiers.”

  “Haven’t you heard that women can’t play chess?” Jemma opened her eyes very wide.

  “Your brother told me you are a master. With a strategist pitted against him, Villiers cannot win.”

  Jemma looked marginally more awake. “There’s a play we call the poisoned pawn. We could allow Villiers to lure you into a false wedding, during which you would produce a real certificate, and then he’d be caught.”

  “But how could we ensure that he would offer to marry me with a false certificate?”

  “Of course we can’t…but men are invariably repetitive. If he offers a secret marriage, we’ll know what he’s planning. It worked with one young lady, so why not with another? I don’t mean to be pessimistic, Roberta, but are you sure you wish to marry such a man? I find my husband tedious, but not dishonorable.”

  Roberta nodded. “It’s my heart’s desire.”

  “In that case, let’s plan on a wedding certificate exchange. We’ll have to wait for his move. In a game of strategy, it’s best to allow the early game to develop on its own rather than taking an opening gambit.”

  Chapter 13

  Finally the ball had dwindled to the point at which Jemma decided that they could go to bed and leave the few remaining revelers to greet the dawn alone.

  Roberta started off for her chambers dreaming of being a duchess. Villiers’s duchess. His behavior didn’t bother her much. How could it, since she’d grown up in a household dominated by her father, whose madness, as she knew well, was not exaggerated by report? Chicanery of Villiers’s type seemed positively wholesome by contrast.

  It took a while to get ready for bed, as her maid didn’t immediately understand that she couldn’t go to sleep with powder in her hair. Perhaps she should just wear a wig the way Damon did.

  So it wasn’t until she’d had a bath, said goodnight to her maid and drew back the heavy rose curtains around her bed that she had a shoc
k.

  She wasn’t alone.

  There was a male body in her bed.

  He was very small and sweaty. He was curled like a little wood-louse, the kind you find when you turn over earth in the springtime. His hair was the exact color of his father’s, a kind of brandy-brown, but all in ringlets. And he was snoring.

  Roberta sat on the edge of the bed and stared at Teddy for a moment. She didn’t have much of a propensity for children; indeed, she had several times thought that her instinct toward maternal love seemed strangely muted. She never felt like doing more than coo over the estate children when they were presented for kisses.

  She didn’t even feel like cooing over this one.

  She was bitterly tired, and there was a sweaty, snoring man, albeit a small one, in her bed.

  With a sigh she reached out and pulled the cord by the bed. A housemaid appeared and clucked. “They’ve been looking for that child all over the house,” she said. “His lordship is that worried!”

  “Well, tell him to come fetch it,” Roberta said, unable to make her tone more enthusiastic.

  A minute later Damon himself appeared. His face had lost all its easy charm of earlier; he barely looked at her, Roberta noted with a pulse of irritation. Instead, he half-lunged at the bed and then stared down at his son.

  “Christ,” he said. It sounded half a curse, half a prayer.

  “Well, you can’t have thought he’d left the house,” she said, letting irritation drip into her tone.

  “I didn’t know where he was. I couldn’t find him,” Damon said, not turning to look at her. “Christ, what a couple of hours it’s been.”

  “Could you possibly take him with you now?” She was feeling more and more irritable. Damon had kissed her earlier, and now he acted with as much interest as if she were a housemaid he had bussed in a side corridor.

  He was already folding back the covers, but he stopped, and looked at her for the first time. “I’m sorry, Roberta.”

  “What?”

  He scooped up the sleeping child and she saw exactly what he meant. Where the boy had nestled—in her bed—there was a dank looking spot. A very large, wet spot. And the smell that arose from it was everything one might expect.

  Her maid let out a little shriek.

  Damon smiled at her ruefully and Roberta registered exactly how adorable he was, at the same time she felt a swell of irritation that almost had her screaming along with the maid.

  “I do apologize. It only happens when he’s in a very deep sleep.”

  “Is that a compliment to my bedding?”

  He nodded. “You are right to be annoyed. I’ll return immediately.” And he made a leg while holding the sleeping child, which Roberta had to admit was quite a trick. Particularly since the rose colored sleeve of his brocade coat was, quite likely, getting ruined.

  The only good thing about it, Roberta thought as the housekeeper and a flock of maids burst into the room, was that it confirmed that vague sense she had that children were undesirable.

  The headache pounding behind her right ear said the same.

  Two minutes later, Damon reentered the room and pulled her unceremoniously to her feet. “Come on,” he said.

  “I gather you didn’t hear that it will take some time to air and make up another room,” Roberta said.

  “So Mrs. Friss, the housekeeper, told me. We came up with a solution.”

  Down the hall they went, until they turned into a room. It was beautifully made up, linen sheets turned back and looking so inviting that Roberta almost fell into them directly.

  “Thank you!” she said, and only then did she realize that a rather rotund individual was hastily sweeping away an assortment of masculine looking accoutrements. “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes,” Damon said. “That will be all, Martins. Thank you.”

  Martins took himself and a collection of neck clothes out of the room.

  “I couldn’t take your room,” Roberta said. But she felt as if she were swaying in place.

  “Of course you could. These mattresses are all old, you know. Wool, most likely. Yours is going to soak up Teddy’s urine like a flower in the sun. You don’t want to sleep in that bed until the mattress is replaced.”

  Roberta shuddered.

  “You look like a ghost but more sickly looking.” Then, before she quite knew what was happening, he undid the knot at her waist, pulled off her dressing gown, ignoring her protests, and bundled her under the covers.

  “I feel like a larger version of your son,” she said, peeping at him from under the covers.

  He sat down on the bed—which was vastly improper—and said, “You don’t resemble Teddy in the slightest.”

  “I suppose that is something to be grateful for. Why was he in my chambers?”

  “I imagine he was on his usual search for my room and thought he’d found it. Jemma’s mother-in-law didn’t waste any inspiration decorating the bedrooms; they’re all precisely the same.”

  Roberta cast a bleary look at the walls, and sure enough the crest of the Beaumonts marched around the top of the walls, and a painting that looked remarkably like Judith holding a platter was directly opposite the bed. She shut her eyes.

  He kissed her so swiftly that it might have been a dream.

  Perhaps it was.

  Chapter 14

  April 12

  Day one of the Villiers/Beaumont chess matches

  Beaumont House

  Early the next afternoon, Beaumont House was brimming like a stagnant pool full of brine shrimp wearing heels and velvet jackets. The only problem was that the residents weren’t in a position to receive them.

  The duke had left the house early in the morning, bound for a meeting with Pitt and then the House of Lords. Teddy woke up at seven in the morning. Damon rose just long enough to push his son in the direction of a maid, and then collapsed back into bed. Teddy migrated to the kitchens, and from thence to the little shed where the gardener kept his spades and the cat kept her kittens. Roberta woke briefly at nine, groaned, and went back to sleep. Jemma was one of those people who only needed five hours of sleep, but never left her room before three in the afternoon on principal. Philidor had given her a book by an Italian chess player named Greco as a goodbye. She was working through the combinations and finding them surprisingly unambitious.

  In consequence, flowers were dropped in the duchess’s sitting room until it resembled nothing so much as a royal funeral. Carriages drew up and left with the regularity of traffic to a new apothecary promising miraculous increases to one’s bosom.

  Finally, the duchess decided that she would receive. “Two of them may come up,” Jemma said to Brigitte.

  “The Duke of Villiers didn’t wait but left a card,” Brigitte said.

  Jemma picked up the beautifully embossed card, as elegant as the man who owned it. His hand was nothing like Elijah’s impossible scrawl. At the time you choose, it said.

  Very nice. There was a certain lack of eagerness there that was entirely appealing in a gentleman with whom one might be embarking on an affaire—she caught herself hastily. Of course, she was merely dallying with the idea. Had she not promised her husband that her salad days were behind her? More to the point—since Elijah had made no promises about his mistress—she had decided to deliver Villiers into the virtuous, if thorny, bonds of matrimony. She sighed and handed the card back to Brigitte. “Six of the clock. Inform him that he may stay to sup afterward. And do send a note to Lady Roberta informing her the same.”

  Of course, the servants would gossip, but servants always knew everything so Jemma saw no reason to prevaricate.

  “Oh, and Brigitte,” she said.

  Brigitte turned as she was about to leave the room. She was as exquisite a little Frenchwoman as existed on British shores and sometimes, Jemma thought, dressed with more éclat than did her mistress. “You know the écharpe cloak that you so admire?”

  Brigitte clasped her hands together. “The blue one, Your G
race, with the black lace?”

  Jemma smiled at her. “It is yours in return for a small act of espionage, which I am convinced you will enjoy.”

  She trembled with excitement. “Enchantée!” Brigitte said, eyes aglow.

  “Villiers comes to play a game of chess with me. He will be accompanied by footmen, naturally.”

  Brigitte nodded.

  “I should dearly love to know every detail of une petite affaire he had with a certain Lady Caroline Killigrew, who found herself with child.”

  “Quelle folie,” Brigitte said, indicating with a Frenchwoman’s briskness just what she thought of Lady Caroline’s foolishness in not controlling her reproductive options.

  “There has been a certain amount of gossip suggesting that Villiers went through a false wedding ceremony with the young lady.”

  Brigitte’s loyalty switched sides instantly. “Chien!” she spat.

  “Perhaps…perhaps not. There are so many sides to a tale, are there not? We need to know everything of Lady Caroline.”

  Brigitte dimpled. “I will do my best.”

  Before a Frenchwoman’s best, an English footman is but a house of straw. “I shall accept two gentlemen to help me dress, Brigitte. Corbin, of course, and perhaps…oh, Viscount St. Albans. He was wearing a truly magnificent costume last night and ought to be rewarded.”

  Brigitte curtsied and flew down the stairs to find St. Albans and Lord Corbin, who were ushered up the stairs and into the duchess’s bedchamber, where they found Jemma attired in a chemise and corset, ready for the gentlemen’s skill in helping her answer delicate points to do with patches, powder, ribbons and finally her gown.

  Roberta awoke to find herself in a room that looked like a copy of her original, except for the faint imprint of Damon’s personality. There was a cravat flung over a chair. A book sat on the dressing table; Roberta wandered over, saw the name John Donne and dropped the poems with a thud. His clothes were in the wardrobe, of course.

  He had a magnificent costume of cherry velvet lined in cream sarsenet. Taking the coat to the window, she could see metal sequins, sewn into elaborate patterns with silver embroidery. Even looking at it made her heart twist with longing. And desire. She had to marry Villiers soon, so that she could buy a gown in precisely this cherry color with sequins.