Desperate Duchesses

  “Humph,” her father said, stumping ahead of them.

  Roberta adjusted her parasol to keep off the sun.

  “Can you see the mermaid yet?” Teddy asked.

  “The marquess will see her first,” his father said. “Why don’t you walk with him?”

  Teddy darted ahead and that very second Damon spun Roberta about and pulled her into a kiss. She gasped in surprise, his tongue slipped between her lips, and the kiss hardened. He kissed her lingeringly, possessively, as if they weren’t surrounded by crowds of farmers pushing their way toward the horse auction.

  “Anyone can see us!” she gasped a moment later, staring up at him.

  “I’m making a spectacle of you,” he said with a smile in his voice.

  She blinked at him and then looked around. No one was showing the faintest interest in a pair of daft gentry kissing in the sunshine.

  And even looking at his eyes made her feel hungry. Hungry…as if it didn’t matter how people stared at her. As if—

  She came up on her tiptoes and kissed him.

  A man pushed by them, and shouted back over his shoulders, “Get yerself a bed, then!”

  Damon laughed, of course, but Roberta didn’t even flinch. “I feel like kissing you,” she whispered.

  His eyes flared, but he shook his head. “No more kisses. There are spectacles and then there are spectacles. And I’m wearing a French cut-away.”

  She frowned at him, and then followed his eyes…down the front of his body. Sure enough, his coat was cut back in a beautiful arch, the better to show off the twelve pearl buttons on his waistcoat, his breeches…and something else.

  Roberta opened her mouth—but Teddy was on them like a tiny whirlwind. “Come on,” he cried. “What are you doing? The mermaid is in a boat!”

  “A boat?” Roberta said, allowing him to pull her away. “But this is land.”

  “I know, but she has her own boat anyway.”

  She did, indeed, have a boat. It was a round little vessel, a boat-shaped cottage. It was painted a faded blue, with curly letters on the side that read Versifying Mermaid. A small line of people waited restlessly outside. A burly fellow was timing the line, and let another person in every few minutes.

  “Where do they go?” Teddy asked.

  “Out the back door,” his father said.

  Roberta was looking at the line, which consisted solely of men. “Damon, go and ask that person in front if the mermaid is appropriately dressed for a young boy,” she said.

  Damon looked down at Teddy, dancing on one leg. “You must be joking. We couldn’t leave, even if she is wearing nothing more than a fish scale on one toe.”

  “Yes, we can,” she said firmly. So Damon made his way over to the guard in front.

  “Where’s Papa going?” Teddy said. “And where’s your papa going?”

  Her father was standing before a tent marked Harry Hunks, Performing Bear. He turned around and beckoned. “This bear can blow a whistle and dance a jig,” he shouted.

  Teddy was there in a second, so Roberta followed them into the cool interior of the tent. The smell of bear was overpowering, however, and she backed out directly, straight into Damon.

  His arms came around her from behind. “I like that,” he said. He pulled her more firmly against him.

  “Your cut-away coat?” she asked, pulling away.

  “There are some things a gentleman can’t control,” he said. “You should have seen me when I was younger.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “Fourteen was an interesting year.”

  “Wasn’t that when Miss Kendrick began sending you perfumed letters?”

  He nodded, a lock of hair brushing his eyes. “I had absolutely no control of my body.”

  “You mean…” Her eyes slid down his front.

  He nodded. “If someone had even mentioned a versifying mermaid, I would have thought about mermaid breasts and been rigid for the next hour. Maybe you and I can play mermaids later?” He grinned wolfishly at her.

  She smiled, but said, “What of this particular mermaid? Is she adequately clothed?”

  “Oh yes,” Damon said. “The man there indicated that this mermaid was pulled from the water twenty-two years ago and has been versifying ever since. He got a bit offended at the idea that she might not be proper fare for children and said that she was a vicar’s daughter. Now that I doubt, but if I were a thirty-year-old mermaid, I’d avail myself of some friendly seaweed. Is Teddy in there with the bear, by the way?”

  “And the smell,” Roberta said.

  Suddenly they heard her father’s voice, loud and clear through the tent flap. “Do you mean to tell me, Mr. Clay, that you starve the bear if he doesn’t behave?”

  “He only misses his supper,” a voice protested in reply. “And he knows, right enough, that’s he’s done wrong, sir. That he does. Just like any dog. Why, I hardly ever have to take a whip—”

  “You whip this bear?” the marquess said, his voice rising to a roar.

  People in line at the mermaid’s tent turned their heads, and a few others drifted closer. Roberta’s hand crept into Damon’s, but somehow her usual feelings of mortification and shame at the fact her father was about to make a spectacle weren’t creeping over her.

  A second later, her father spilled out of the tent, followed by a lean, hungry-looking fellow, presumably Mr. Clay.

  “I can’t bear the stench another moment,” her father said. “Not another moment. And just think what that poor bear makes of it, sir, since in the normal way of things he’d be living at the top of a tall tree, smelling nothing but the blue sky!”

  They all reflexively looked up. “I does my best,” Mr. Clay bleated.

  “Your best isn’t good enough!” the marquess said. “I’ll have that bear, or I’ll know the reason why.”

  Cutting off Mr. Clay’s ineffectual bluster, the marquess produced a handful of guineas, and ownership of Harry Hunks passed hands.

  “I’ll fetch him tomorrow,” the marquess said. “And you’d better be at your residence with the bear, Mr. Clay, or I shall have the High Constable on you!”

  Mr. Clay was looking blissfully at the guineas in his hand. “I can go back home with these,” he said. “I’ll be there, your lordship, and so will Harry.”

  “I’ll have more of those for you if you can find a cart to take Harry to my country house.”

  Damon leaned over and said in Roberta’s ear, “How many bears do you have at home?”

  “None,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “But we do have a couple of deer that were supposed to be elk, but turned out to have horns glued on, a terrible weight for their poor heads, I assure you. And we have some Greenland ducks—”

  “Greenland ducks?” Damon said with a crack of laughter.

  “Hush! Papa will hear you. They are rather peculiar, and we think they’re a strain of exotic chicken because they can’t swim. At first papa dropped them into the lake and it was only very quick work on the part of a groom that saved their life.”

  Meanwhile, they had made their way back to the mermaid’s boat. The marquess dropped a few coins into the guard’s hands.

  “He’s a pirate!” Teddy said, awed.

  Damon ducked his head as they went through the low door of the boat. Seated in the corner was a mermaid.

  She was quite pretty, with long golden hair and a sweet face. She had a glossy green tail wrapped with a net and a few artistically placed shells. Unlike any picture he’d ever seen of a siren of the deep, she wore a starched white bodice that overlapped the beginning of her tail. In fact, she looked a bit like a vicar’s daughter. Except for the satin tail, of course.

  Teddy marched up before her, and said, “May I ask you questions?”

  The mermaid nodded at Teddy and smiled.

  “I will answer whatever I can,

  As a daughter of the sea to a child of man.”

  The marquess started rocking back and forth
on his heels, a sure sign of enjoyment.

  “Are you friends with fish?” Teddy asked.

  “Fish were my favorite boon companions,

  My very best friend was a shark,

  We would whip about and have great fun,

  Until I was caught by His Majesty’s barque.”

  “Sharks!” Teddy said, eyes round. “I thought they were the monsters of the deep, and ate everything in their path.”

  “Have you met a shark, Oh child of the sands?

  For ignorance is no excuse for those with hands.”

  Teddy shook his head. “I’d love to meet a shark,” he said, coming closer.

  “How long have you lived in this boat, oh daughter of the sea?” the marquess asked. He had his hands clasped behind his back and he was grinning like a fool.

  “Your father seems to be taken by the mermaid’s versifying abilities,” Damon murmured to Roberta.

  “Or something,” she said.

  She’d seen that ecstatic look on his face before. Specifically, when Selina pranced out on the stage of her traveling troupe, and when they first saw Mrs. Grope stride onto the stage in Bath.

  “The memory of my watery cave grows dim,” the mermaid was saying, “’Tis been twenty years ere I swam in the deep, Now I almost think I am growing a limb.”

  “Nicely put,” Damon said.

  The guard popped his head in and growled, “Time’s up. The mermaid has others waiting for her.”

  The marquess turned to the mermaid.

  “Could a gentleman’s family lure a mermaid to swim,

  If we arranged it so she needn’t stir a fin,

  Into the shallows of a tea garden for tea,

  Upon the earnest request of—of me?”

  “Tsk, Tsk,” Damon said. “That final rhyme left something to be desired, my lord.”

  But the mermaid dimpled and looked as if she were blushing a little. But instead of answering, interestingly enough, she looked at Roberta. She nodded toward her tail, and then toward Teddy. After a second, Roberta realized that she was asking if Teddy would be upset to learn that the mermaid did indeed have limbs.

  Roberta gave her a smile. “It’s so hot in here,” she said, turning to Damon. “I think I should like to go home. And Teddy, it’s time that we said goodbye to the lovely mermaid.”

  Teddy bowed, very solemn. “It has been marvelous to meet you.”

  “You remind me of a shark I once knew, called Perth,” she said, perfectly seriously. “He had lovely brown eyes like yours, Oh child of the earth.”

  Teddy bowed again and took Roberta’s hand as they left through the rear. “I should like to be a shark,” he said, and he chattered so much on the way back to the carriage that he didn’t even notice that the marquess wasn’t with them until they got home.

  Whereupon Roberta told him that her papa had gone to arrange for Harry Hunks to travel back home with him.

  “I want to see Harry Hunks again,” Teddy said wistfully.

  “You will,” Damon said, smiling at Roberta over his head. “You will.”

  Chapter 34

  April 19

  Day eight of the Villiers/Beaumont chess matches

  Roberta stretched, feeling a pleasurable ache in all parts of her body, and then settled down to think.

  Obviously, she needed to think. She plumped up the pillows to remove the unmistakable evidence that there had been two heads sleeping in her bed and thought: the Duke of Villiers.

  My fiancé.

  It was rather disconcerting to realize how fickle she was.

  Ellen bustled in and began darting around the room, trailing a stream of conversation.

  “A picnic?” Roberta said, belatedly catching the word. “Who?”

  It seemed that everyone was going on this picnic. “Not the master, of course,” Ellen said. “He’s gone to his offices long ago.”

  Roberta thought about it. A picnic on the Fleet River sounded like a delicious way to avoid the thorny issue of her fiancé. “Marvelous,” she said, swinging her legs out of bed.

  “Her Grace is just playing her move with the Duke of Villiers,” Ellen said.

  Roberta froze. “Is the duke accompanying us?”

  “Of course,” Ellen said, giving her a warm smile. “I’m sure he wouldn’t miss it. He enquired for you yesterday, but you were off with the mermaid. What Master Teddy hasn’t told us about that mermaid!”

  The picnic involved not just one flat-bottomed boat, but a whole fleet of them. Roberta climbed into a boat without any difficulty, and Teddy clambered next to her, taking it for granted that the two of them would sit together.

  “I have a great deal to tell you,” he said. “I talked to Rummer all morning and—this will really interest you, Lady Roberta—I discovered what a bog-trotting croggie is!”

  Jemma almost had to have a boat to herself, given the width of her panniers, and there were a few screams when the Duke of Villiers’s cane caught on the side of the boat and he fell directly into Jemma’s lap.

  Roberta had a difficult time keeping her mind on the question of bogs and croggies, because it seemed to her that Villiers took a long time to disentangle himself from Jemma’s lap. In fact, Roberta couldn’t help wondering where her fiancé spent the night. Did his chess game shift to something more intimate?

  Mrs. Grope climbed into the boat rather grimly; she was intent on telling the company at large that she was used to large pleasure boats, such as those the Prince of Wales traveled in, though Roberta doubted very much that Mrs. Grope had ever been on a boat at the same time as the prince.

  “We played a lovely game of charades aboard His Majesty’s yacht,” she could hear her telling her father. “Why, the girls and I were talking about it last night in the green room…” She looked wistfully into the distance.

  Damon settled himself opposite and met her eyes with a grin. “Dollymop charades,” he mouthed.

  Roberta couldn’t help giggling. The world was a beautiful place when one was going boating with a lovely, loose-limbed man, who had done such delicious things the night before…She even felt a flash of approval for Villiers and his idea that chastity was an antiquated notion. He was right!

  She gave Villiers a huge smile, boat to boat. He seemed rather taken aback, but nodded.

  “Too demonstrative,” Damon observed. “You can’t go smiling at your fiancé like that. Smiles, words…those are for ordinary mortals. The two of you should communicate only in nods.”

  She turned her nose up at his silliness.

  Teddy was eager to talk about a Mr. Swarthy, who often wears brown paper pinned to his white silk stockings. “Do you know why that is, Lady Roberta?”

  Teddy had an endearing earnestness about him. His chin was really adorable. It was tiny with a little dimple that mimicked his father’s. “I don’t have any idea,” Roberta said. “I wouldn’t pin brown paper to my legs; would you?”

  “He does it in bad weather,” Teddy reported. “And he also sings ‘Fair Dorinda’ in the coffeehouse, and they don’t like it.”

  They were drifting down the river. The river was more dappled and green today, sleepy in the sunshine.

  “The water sounds like babies talking,” Teddy said.

  “I think you’re going to be a novelist,” Roberta told him, listening for the little sleepy murmurs of watery babies.

  He beamed and slipped a damp hand into her gloved one. Roberta looked down at his plump fingers and then pulled off her gloves and picked up his hand again.

  Mrs. Grope was squealing because a family of ducks was following their boat. For a moment she couldn’t see what was happening, and then she realized that her father had raided the picnic hamper and was dropping cucumber sandwiches into the water.

  Jemma and Villiers weren’t even looking at the water; Villiers had a piece of paper and they were scribbling with a pencil and talking. As she watched, Jemma snatched the paper back and wrote something on it.

  Damon followed her gla
nce. “Working out a chess game,” he said. “Jemma’s chamber is always filled with pieces of paper covered with imaginary games.”

  “How on earth do you write out a chess game?”

  “It’s a series of chicken scrawls,” he explained. “BK4, for example, means that someone moved his bishop to King’s Four.”

  “Are we going to swim today?” Teddy enquired.

  “You are going to swim,” his father said. “Phillips, who is poling the boat with the marquess in it, was kind enough to offer to take you in the water. We’ll drop you off at the mud flats.”

  Teddy whooped with joy, and in the resulting mêlée he rocked their boat so much that it would have fallen over except for its wide bottom. A few minutes later they handed him off to a cheerful-looking footman.

  “Shall we follow the river all the way to the end today?” Roberta enquired, when Damon settled back into the boat. It had been easy when Teddy was with them, but now she felt prickly and strange because they were alone…alone except for a footman and the cheerful voice of her father in the boat just in front of them. He was reciting a poem that had to do with fish and fins.

  Damon sprawled next to her, all easy grace and muscle, and didn’t answer, just picked up her ungloved hand. His thumb played a tune on her wrist, and his touch, that little touch, turned her blood to liquid gold. She couldn’t even look at him, so she looked straight ahead, at the way the shadows flowed over the side of the boat, reflecting off the water in pale sparks of light.

  She was wearing a gown of cherry muslin, one of those sewn by Mrs. Parthnell, which meant it was of very simple construction and had no hoops. Her hair was tied up and fell in ringlets; she had blackened her eyelashes. She had never felt prettier in her life.

  “What do you do all day?” she asked impulsively. She wanted to know everything about him: what he ate for breakfast, and what he named his mare, and where he met his friends.

  “When I’m not making love to you?” His voice was low, so the footman couldn’t hear it.

  But a flush struck her face as if she had a sunburn. “Don’t!”