Desperate Duchesses

  From the Duke of Villiers to the Earl of Gryffyn:

  You’re a fool. If you kill me, she will smell no less perfumed to you, and if I kill you, you will soon smell much worse.

  From the Earl of Gryffyn to the Duke of Villiers:

  Your choice of weapons?

  From the Duke of Villiers to the Earl of Gryffyn:

  Rapiers. Dawn, Wimbledon Commons, near the windmill. Tuesday. I have a chess game planned with Lord Bonnington tomorrow and can’t bother with this. You are a hot-headed Fool who clearly has no sense of the Importance of Women (none whatsoever) nor of a good Sleep (vastly to be desired). I shall, however, resign myself to killing you.

  Chapter 38

  April 21

  Day ten of the Villiers/Beaumont chess matches

  It was a noise beside her bed that woke her up. “Mmmm,” Roberta said, reaching out—and waking up instantly. “Teddy! Are you lost again, child?”

  “No,” he said. He stood next to the bed like a little ghost in a white nightgown. His face, normally so cheerful, was woebegone.

  “What’s the matter?” she said, peering at him. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “Can we sleep with you?” he burst out.

  “We?”

  But it was too late. In clambered a small boy and a kitten, who promptly leaped to the bottom of the bed and curled up there, somewhat to Roberta’s relief.

  It took her twenty minutes to coax out of him the information that Rummer had given him. “Of course, Papa will win the duel,” he said, snuggling down into the covers, one hand clasping hers. “Papa always wins, that’s what Rummer says.”

  “Rummer shouldn’t have told you about the duel,” she said firmly. Her mind was whirling with terror, spinning with the fact of it.

  If Damon was fighting Villiers, he was fighting for her honor. And her honor, her honor wasn’t worth a scrap of paper, not in comparison to the way she felt about Damon. It was as if mortal coldness gripped her heart and clenched her stomach. What could she do? What could she do?

  She would pull Villiers aside when he came to play his game with Jemma, and she would beg him. Surely he wouldn’t deny her, if only out of whatever fugitive affection that caused him to ask her to marry.

  She stared into the darkness for hours, planning what to say, parsing her sentences, praying.

  Mostly praying.

  She fell asleep only when the light was peeking through the curtains of her bedchamber. Deep in a sleep of leaden exhaustion, she never heard Teddy scamper out of bed and return to the nursery to be roundly scolded by his nursemaid. She never heard her maid tiptoe in and then decide not to wake her, based on the white stillness of her face. She was far too fast asleep to hear the faint commotion that greeted the arrival of the Duke of Villiers, here to play his piece at chess.

  She slept on.

  When she finally awoke, she was aghast to see how high the sun had risen. But did it really matter? The world knew where Villiers spent his days: at Parsloe’s, playing chess. He had told her so himself. She’d find him there, if she had to.

  She dressed in an utterly charming affair of light silk embroidered with bluebirds. Quite in Villiers’s line, now she thought of it.

  She went straight to Jemma’s chamber, bursting into the room, hoping that Villiers was there, only to see the blood drain from Jemma’s face when she told her Teddy’s news.

  “Villiers said nothing to me this morning,” Jemma said.

  “Villiers has already been here?”

  “He left an hour ago.” Jemma swallowed. “Oh God Almighty, why couldn’t you have kept out of Damon’s bed while you were engaged to Villiers?”

  Roberta sank into a chair. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I shall die from the guilt of it. I love Damon so much that I lost my head. I didn’t think.”

  Jemma’s face softened. “I gather you no longer love Villiers, then?”

  “I was a fool.”

  “It’s a common condition.”

  “I’m going to ask Villiers to back down,” Roberta said. “Do you think it might work?”

  “He lost this morning,” Jemma said hollowly.

  “He—”

  “He lost the game. All of London will know by this afternoon. He lost to a woman. To me.”

  There was no one in the breakfast room. Fowle informed her that Mrs. Grope had gone to the theater again, and her father had gone out. The mermaid, Roberta thought.

  Damon had taken Teddy away for the day. A last day with his son, Roberta thought, and her heart flooded with such guilt that she could scarcely breathe. She would stop this duel if she had to kill Villiers herself.

  Unfortunately, like chess, she had neglected to study the fine points of swordsmanship.

  “I should like a carriage,” she told Fowle, and a few minutes later, a smart chaise awaited her.

  Roberta pulled on her gloves. She was icy calm now. She was going to stop this monstrous thing before it happened.

  Parsloe’s was a rather ordinary looking place for all the attention it got, to Roberta’s mind. She was met by a butler who asked her if she was a member of the chess club.

  “I am not,” Roberta said, rather startled. “I didn’t known there were female members.”

  “There are,” he said with a regal bow. “May I help you, Madame?”

  “I should like to see the Duke of Villiers,” she said.

  “I’m afraid that he is upstairs, in the Members’ Rooms, and no one who is not a member is allowed therein.”

  “You will have to make an exception,” Roberta said.

  There must have been something in her eye because he stopped being a starched butler and cowered a little. “Of course, you are a lady,” he said.

  “I am not any lady,” she told him. “I am engaged to the Duke of Villiers.”

  “In that case!” he said, gesturing to the stairs. “After you, my lady, after you.”

  She climbed up the stairs and a moment later found herself in a room filled with gentlemen. They were all watching Villiers, which made it easy to find him, at any rate. He was spectacularly dressed, sitting at one end of the table, his legs spread wide. He looked absorbed, elegant—and dangerous.

  Roberta dizzily took in the muscled strength of his shoulders and the controlled menace in the way he put down each chess piece. He looked like a man who would slay an opponent with no more emotion than he would take a pawn.

  “Your Grace,” she said, coming to stand before the table. The other man looked up quickly and suddenly the whole room was on their feet, bowing and scraping. She ignored them, looking directly at Villiers. “Your Grace,” she said, dropping a curtsy. “I came to beg some private conversation.”

  His eyes rested on her, cold, indifferent. How had she ever thought that was an attractive trait in a man? He was loathsome to her now, snakelike in his magnificence.

  “I see no reason for that,” he said. “I am in the middle of a match, as you see.”

  “Please, Your Grace,” she pleaded.

  But he looked at her with something akin to hatred. “If you must speak, speak here. There is nothing, it seems, in my life that is secret—is there, St. Albans?”

  The slender young man standing to the side shrugged. “It is the fate of all of us to occasionally find our faces depicted in the windows of Humphrey’s.” His eyes lingered on Roberta, and she realized that he knew precisely who she was, and he was thinking about the cartoons in Rambler’s Magazine that were sold in Humphrey’s Print Shop. Slowly she looked about and while she didn’t see hostility, she did see knowledge. They knew who she was. They knew that she had been cartooned as desperate for a husband, as begging a footman to marry her. They knew that she had spurned Villiers for the Earl of Gryffyn.

  She looked back at Villiers. He stood beside his chair, his eyes impenetrable.

  She walked a step forward, and then she fell to her knees.

  There was a gasp in the room, and a rustle of agitation. Roberta ignored it
. “Please, Your Grace. Please do not fight a duel with the Earl of Gryffyn. He is my future husband, and I cannot bear to see him die.”

  “I would not have expected this of you,” he said, staring down at her and actually looking rather startled. “I thought you were of different stock than your father, Lady Roberta.”

  “You were in error. I find myself more like him every day. Please. I am begging you. I am desperate.”

  There was a murmur around the room, a flourishing of whispers. “Raise her up,” someone said to Villiers. And: “This isn’t decent.”

  Villiers started, and came forward. He reached out a hand but she shook her head. “Not until you promise.”

  “I cannot promise,” he told her, and she could have sworn that she saw a flash of sympathy in those cold eyes of his. “It’s no longer a matter of your honor, but that of Gryffyn’s.”

  “My honor is worthless!” she cried.

  He stooped down and brought her to her feet. “Your courage is not worthless, Lady Roberta.” He kept her hands for a moment. “I will apologize,” he said. “That’s the best I can do, and since I’ve never done such a thing before in my life, you see that my apology means that I put your honor at a rather higher pitch than your own valuation.”

  He dropped her hands and turned away. “If you’ll forgive me, milady, we have a chess match to finish.”

  An arm came around her shoulder, and Roberta felt herself pulled away.

  “Mr. Cunningham!” she said dully. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I often play a match during the afternoon when His Grace is in the House of Lords.” He said nothing further, and Roberta couldn’t bring herself to say anything either. So he accompanied her home in silence.

  It had to be enough.

  It simply…had to be enough.

  Chapter 39

  April 22

  Day eleven: the Beaumont/Beaumont chess match

  remains in play

  Dawn was curling over Wimbledon Commons, making the wheels of all the carriages disappear and look as if their fat bellies were scraping the ground.

  “I shall be sick,” Roberta said between clenched teeth.

  “Open the carriage door,” Jemma said, not helpfully. She was crying, just a little. She hadn’t said anything, but Roberta saw her wipe away a tear, and then another. “Damon will be fine,” she said, as if to herself.

  “Does he know how to fight with a sword?” Roberta whispered.

  Jemma frowned at her. “Of course he does!”

  Carriages and more carriages kept pulling up until there was a double row, and men pushed by their door as if they were going to see a cock fight.

  “Villiers said he would apologize,” Roberta said. “He promised.” Her fists were clenched. “Should I go and remind him, Jemma?” she cried. “Should I go and see what’s happening?”

  But Jemma shook her head, her eyes bleak. “You’ve done all you can. If you shame Villiers in front of all these people, there’s no saying what he might do.”

  “What would shame him?” Roberta asked desperately.

  “To have you intervene again. And you would shame Damon.”

  “But he would live!”

  “He will live,” Jemma said. But her face was icy white.

  “I begged him not to go,” Roberta said. “He just laughed.”

  “That’s Damon.”

  They waited, and still fog curled in the center of the field, and nothing happened. “What is a rapier?” Roberta said, forcing the words past stiff lips. “Do you know?”

  “A thin blade,” Jemma said. “It is favored by the French and considered to be agile, intelligent and supple.”

  “What?” Roberta said, unable to get her mind around this cluster of adjectives. “Do you think that Damon can fight with it?”

  Jemma turned her head and stared at her. “What makes you question Damon’s ability so?”

  Just then two men walked onto the field and Roberta gasped. They weren’t Villiers and Damon, but the seconds. They seemed to be scuffing the grass, seeing if it was slippery with dew.

  “Because,” she said, “Villiers himself told me that chess players are the finest duelists. That makes him the finest sword fighter in the kingdom. It’s not Damon’s skill I’m worried about. It’s Villiers’s that terrifies me.”

  Jemma laughed, and the sound of it jarred Roberta to the bottom of her stomach. “What makes you think that Damon can’t play chess?”

  “He never—He—”

  “He’s quite likely the best chess player in England,” Jemma said flatly. “My father taught us both and it was his considered opinion that Damon had an edge on me. Damon finds the game boring because it doesn’t present enough of a challenge.”

  Roberta swallowed. “Not enough of a challenge? Then, what?”

  “Have you talked of nothing, all this time you spent in bed together?”

  Roberta shook her head. “Not about the right things.”

  “Bills of Exchange. He plays with them, manipulates the market. He moves on a larger chess board; he’s like my husband in that.”

  “He really can fence?”

  “Of course,” Jemma said irritably. “He’s fought at least four duels that I know of.”

  “Did he win all four?”

  “Of course.”

  “He told me last night that he had decided to strike Villiers in the right shoulder.”

  “There you see the thought pattern of a master player,” Jemma said. “Philidor often called the piece with which he would check my king.”

  “But were any of Damon’s previous opponents chess masters?”

  There was a sigh. “No.”

  To the side of the field, Damon was talking to his second. “There’s not so much fog that we can’t see,” he said impatiently. He wanted to get this over with and go back to breakfast with Roberta. He knew she was there, poor mouse, huddled in the carriage with Jemma.

  The second hurried over to talk to Villiers’s second, and then rushed back.

  “His Grace would like to speak to you a moment,” he said.

  Damon dropped his coat onto the wet grass. He would fight in his old boots and a shirt, rolled up to the sleeves. He took one more look at his rapier, a beautiful length of steel from Toledo. He almost had an unfair advantage, using it. Still, he picked it up and strolled over to Villiers’s gaudy carriage.

  The duke was stripped to a shirt. He was bending his blade, testing its spring.

  “Toledo,” Damon said with pleasure. “Excellent.”

  Villiers lifted those heavy eyes of his and murmured, “An even match is always best.”

  Damon waited a moment but Villiers seemed to be having some trouble speaking. Finally, he said in an almost strangled voice, “I want to apologize.”

  “What?”

  “Apologize. I should not have maligned Lady Roberta’s honor.”

  Damon narrowed his eyes. “She got to you, didn’t she?”

  Villiers looked up again. “What do you mean?”

  “Roberta. What did she do, exactly?”

  “She fell on her knees in Parsloe’s,” Villiers said flatly. “She begged me not to fight you.”

  “Sounds very dramatic.” Damon loved the sound of it.

  “Oh, believe me,” Villiers said. “It was. She enjoyed a wide audience.”

  “Right. Now that’s out of the way, shall we start?”

  Villiers glanced at him. “My apology?”

  “I would have acquiesced to any demand of hers as well,” Damon said. “But the fact of it is, Villiers, we’re going to fight. Now.”

  Villiers, looking up at the earl, saw him as a man with an easy smile, a man whom he had obviously never understood. A sudden thought struck him. “Do you play chess?”

  “Never,” Damon said promptly. “Bores me to tears. The only partner I ever had who could give me a challenge was my sister. How’s the game with her going, by the way?”

  Villiers stared at him
. Gryffyn was as unmoved by the prospect of a duel as he was by the prospect of death. For the first time, he felt a faint prickling. A faint warning in the back of his mind. “I lost,” he said. “I lost the game yesterday.”

  But the earl was already striding out onto the field, hailing their seconds.

  Villiers walked out more slowly, rearranging his expectations of the game. He was going to have to kill—or be killed. In the earl’s eyes was the deadly cheer of a man whose future wife has been maligned and who will die to protect her honor. Except that Gryffyn clearly had no intention of dying.

  Two minutes later they were circling each other, their boots leaving prints on the wet grass.

  “We can wait until the sun dries the grass if you’d like,” Gryffyn offered.

  “No.” Villiers couldn’t help but remember himself, offering Gordon a rook advantage.

  He started watching for an opening. The earl seemed content to circle forever. Finally Villiers swooped in with an upward-cutting manchette blow. Parried by Gryffyn. He tried a pass in tierce and a redoublement. Parried, and parried again. Finally Villiers fell back, deciding to let the earl make the next move.

  When he did, it was supremely smooth, a twisting, swirling demi-volte that seemed to come out of nowhere. It was only luck that Villiers’s blade caught his opponent’s rapier, deflecting the blow.

  Gryffyn fell back and they circled once more. But there was something different about him now; the brooding joy of a predator was in every movement of those long legs.

  There was nothing so terrible about that, except that Villiers himself didn’t have the energy of virtue behind him. He felt wrong.

  He shouldn’t have called Roberta a concubine, not after he told her to go lose her chastity. He was the one who whipped her into Gryffyn’s bed, and then castigated her for it. And then too…there was Benjamin in the back of his mind.

  Even as he parried a brilliant time-thrust from the earl, he thought about how nothing had gone right since Benjamin died. It was his infernal arrogance, that was it.

  The earl tried a prise de fer; he knocked it to the side. Villiers felt rage rising, finally, from the bottom of his soul. What was he doing on a field in the cold dawn, fighting a duel with a man he was uninterested in killing?