Desperate Duchesses

  His eyes widened. “You grow more fascinating by the moment. Do tell me a bit of poetry.”

  She scowled at him, and then relented. “My father’s letter to you, Jemma, takes the form of a poem in fourteen stanzas.” She opened her little knotting-bag and handed over her father’s letter.

  “It’s entitled ‘Epistle to a Duchess,’” Jemma said. Roberta watched her smile fade into a look of puzzlement. “I’m not sure I’m intelligent enough for poetry,” she said, finally.

  Which was a kind assessment. “It’s not a question of your intelligence,” Roberta said. “I’m afraid that Papa’s poetry is obscure in the extreme.”

  Damon took the poem. “This isn’t so bad. It ever was allow’d, dear Madam, Even from the days of father Adam. Well, I don’t see much of difficulty here, Roberta. Such stuff is naught but mere tautology,” he continued. “What’s tautology again? I can’t remember, if I ever knew. And so take that for my apology. He’s apologizing, Jemma.”

  “For what?”

  “For imposing his daughter upon your presence,” Roberta said firmly.

  Damon was still reading ahead. “Here he’s talking about the solid meal of sense and worth, set off by the dessert of mirth. Very nice rhyme!”

  “Sometimes his poetry is quite good,” Roberta said with a flash of loyalty. “He’s writing an excellent poem on David and Bathsheba, for example. One can really understand what he’s describing.”

  “Well, this poem ends with your most obedient,” Damon said. “I think he’s asking you to bring out his daughter with all the pomp and circumstance Beaumont can afford, Roberta. My expert judgment.”

  Jemma took back the poem and puzzled at it for a moment. “But what’s the part about a rude ungrateful bear, enough to make a parson swear?”

  “I find with Papa’s poems that it’s best not to devote oneself too strictly to meaning,” Roberta said.

  Damon let out a bark of laughter.

  “There is just one more thing that I should tell you,” Roberta said.

  Brother and sister turned to look at her. “Wait, don’t tell us,” Damon said, with his irresistible grin. “The family character bred true in you as well, remote relative though you are. Let’s guess: You have a child—you, with such a young, innocent—”

  “No!” Roberta said.

  But before she could continue, he said, “Your turn, Jemma.”

  Jemma looked thoughtful. “At some time last year, you were at an inn. You gazed out of the window and were instantly struck by an ungovernable passion for my brother.”

  Roberta’s mouth fell open but Damon didn’t notice. “Very nice! Can you work Teddy into the picture?”

  “More than anything, Roberta wished to be a mother, but unfortunate circumstances have decreed that she will have no children of her own, therefore Teddy will become her most cherished possession.”

  Damon was laughing. “What about me? I want to be her most cherished possession.”

  Jemma turned to Roberta. “You must forgive us; it’s an old game that we—” She stopped. “You did see Damon last summer! And you fell in love with him? How very peculiar. Are you sure you wish to marry my brother? I can assure you that he’s terribly annoying.”

  Roberta started giggling. “No, I don’t wish to marry your brother!”

  “There’s no need to be quite so emphatic,” Damon observed. “I would quite like to marry you myself, although I see that I shall have to assuage my grieved heart elsewhere.”

  “But I saw something on your face,” Jemma said. “I’m sure—”

  “I went to a ball given by Lady Cholmondelay,” Roberta said hurriedly, getting over the rough ground as quickly as she could. “And I did meet someone. I should like to marry him. In fact, I have made up my mind to it.”

  “How useful,” Jemma said. “Love at first sight. I’m sure it must be most delicious. I would quite welcome it myself. I’ve fallen in love many times but never without thoroughly discussing the impulse with my closest friends.”

  Her brother snorted. “Not to mention your less-than-close friends and the other half of Paris. Although I thought it was love at first sight between Delacroix and yourself. All Paris thought it was.”

  Jemma looked insulted. “Absolutely not! I spoke to each of my intimate friends before I allowed myself to feel a patch of affection for the man. That is my invariable practice. A man about whom one knows nothing is invariably boring or diseased.”

  “There you have it, Lady Roberta. You might want to rethink your love at first sight,” Damon said.

  “I do know quite a lot about him,” Roberta said shyly.

  “If there is one thing in the world that I love it’s a challenge,” Jemma said. “The bigger the challenge, the better!”

  Roberta took a deep breath. And told them.

  She was answered by silence.

  Chapter 4

  That afternoon

  Harriet, Duchess of Berrow, hadn’t been in London for a year, and she hadn’t been to Beaumont House in at least eight. It was just the same, of course: a huge, jumbled assortment of mullioned windows and towers that had no place in London. Terraces sprawled on two sides, in blatant defiance of the properly contained attitude of a townhouse. It looked as if it had been picked up in Northamptonshire, transported by a giant’s hand to London, and plopped down on the street. The other houses around it—elegantly built in the Portland stone everyone preferred—looked positively affronted at having to reside beside such a monstrosity.

  The last time she’d been here Benjamin had been alive. He’d run up the stairs, always ahead of her, and banged the knocker himself.

  Then, Benjamin had leapt ahead of her in every way, and now footmen were the only men who accompanied her to parties.

  The door opened and she gave herself a mental shake. The last thing she wanted to do was lower Jemma’s spirits. Benjamin was gone, had been gone these many months and after she did just one thing in his memory—just the one—she would forget him. Put him away in her memories, or whatever it is you do with a dead husband.

  Truly, a dead husband was an inconvenient presence, she realized, not for the first time.

  The butler led her to a small dining room and then stood to the side. “The Duchess of—” he intoned. Suddenly he lunged forward, words forgotten.

  Jemma was standing on a chair, with her back to them. She was in the process of unhooking a very large painting from the wall. Even as they watched she staggered back, her heel on the very edge of the seat, the huge frame waving in the air.

  “Your Grace!” the butler shouted. He caught the huge gold frame just as it began toppling toward the ground.

  Harriet rushed forward as well, just in time to stand directly under Jemma as she fell off the chair. They both hit the ground with a whoosh as their hoops swelled up around them. Simultaneously the butler lost his grip on the painting and it crashed into a sideboard.

  “Oh no,” Jemma said, laughing. “Is that Harriet?”

  Harriet scrambled to her feet. Jemma’s butler was shouting, presumably for a footman.

  “It is indeed I,” she said, smiling down at Jemma. Her friend had changed; her beauty had a modish edge that was a long way from Harriet’s childhood memories. But the sleek blonde hair, the deep lip and most of all, her litup, intelligent eyes, those were the same.

  With one practiced slap, Jemma collapsed her right pannier and then rolled to that side to get up. Harriet held out a hand. With another whoosh, Jemma’s panniers exploded as she stood up and there she was: as sophisticated and elegant a French lady as Harriet could imagine.

  She swallowed her up in one of the lightning quick hugs Harriet remembered so well. “You are as beautiful as ever, but so thin, Harriet. And the black.”

  “Well, you do remember…”

  “But it’s been almost two years since Benjamin died, hasn’t it?” Jemma pulled back. “Did you get my note after his funeral?”

  Harriet nodded. “And I had yo
ur lovely note from Florence too, with the drawings.”

  “Well, it had been a year,” Jemma twinkled at her. “I personally think that David has a lovely physique although perhaps slightly, shall we say, under-endowed?”

  Harriet laughed a bit hollowly. “Only you would notice.”

  “Nonsense. It’s enough to make one eye Italian males in a most suspicious manner, I assure you. After all, it might well be a national trait.”

  “What were you doing with that portrait?” Harriet asked.

  “Ghastly thing. I stared at it all the way through luncheon and then promised myself that I would take it off the wall directly.”

  Harriet glanced at it, but couldn’t see that it was particularly depressing; it depicted a man asleep on a bed while a woman stood next to him with a flask of wine.

  “Look more closely,” Jemma said. “Do you see her knife?”

  Sure enough, hidden in the folds of her skirt was the wicked, curved tip of a knife. And on close observation, the woman’s face was rather disturbing.

  “The house is bestrewed by versions of Judith and Holofernes. I would ask Beaumont about his mother’s penchant for the subject, but I’m terrified of his likely answer. In this one, she’s about to saw his head off. If you’d like to see the event itself, that is hanging in the grand salon in the west wing. The aftermath—i.e., his head apart from his body—appears in various versions all over the house.”

  Harriet blinked. “How—how—” and closed her mouth.

  “I gather you don’t know the Dowager Duchess of Beaumont,” Jemma continued blithely. “Let’s go upstairs, shall we? We can have some tea in my rooms.”

  “Why, this is quite lovely,” Harriet said a moment later. The walls were white with pale green trim, and painted all over with little sprays of blossoms. “Did Beaumont have the room made over for your return?”

  “Of course he didn’t,” Jemma said. “I sent a man from Paris two months ago, as soon as I decided to return to London. My mother-in-law had this room very grand in gold-and-white. Naturally I had to have all new furnishings. I am so fond of French panniers, you know. I wouldn’t have been able to fit into the chairs designed thirty years ago.”

  Harriet paused beside a small marble chess table. It was set out with a game in progress. “You haven’t given up your chess.”

  “Do you remember enough of the game to see where I am? I’m playing white, and my queen is in a veritable nest of pawns. I’m almost certainly beaten.” Jemma dropped into a comfortably wide chair, her panniers effortlessly compressing under her silk skirt.

  Harriet sighed. It had always been so, even when they were young girls growing up on adjoining estates. She and Jemma would go for picnics, and she would come back having been bitten by stinging ants, with her hair down her back. Jemma would traipse back to the house wearing a posy of daisies and every hair in place. Sure enough, when she lowered herself cautiously into the chair opposite Jemma, her right-side hoop sprang into the air like a huge blister. She forced it into place.

  “I’ve missed you,” Jemma said, stretching out her legs. “I love Paris, as you must know. But I missed you.”

  Harriet smiled, a rueful smile. She’d lived a country mouse’s life for the past few years. “You have been in Paris,” she said. “You needn’t tell me flummery like that. Those are the most gorgeous little slippers, by the way.”

  “Paris is full of Frenchwomen. They are nice slippers, aren’t they? I like the embroidery. I have them in three different shades.”

  “The fact that Paris is full of Frenchwomen surely came as no surprise?”

  “That’s my Harriet! I missed your peppery little comments. You always deflated my absurdities.” She leaned forward. “Are you all right? You seem tired.”

  “I should be quite over Benjamin’s death,” Harriet said. “It’s been twenty-two months. But somehow thinking of him makes me tired, and I can’t stop thinking, no matter how I try.”

  “Thinking of Beaumont makes me tired, and he’s not even dead. At any rate, Frenchwomen make difficult friends. They’re given to thinking that Englishwomen are, by nature, inelegant and rather foolish. But even if one overcomes the prejudices of one’s nationality, I have never felt as easy with a Frenchwoman as I do with you, Harriet.” And as if to demonstrate her point, she stood up, reached under her skirts and untied her panniers. With a little clatter they fell to the ground and Jemma curled bonelessly back into the chair. “Go on,” she said, “you do it too! You are spending the day with me, aren’t you? I must introduce you to Roberta; she’s a young relative come to live with me and make her debut.”

  Harriet hesitated. “You have a ball tomorrow. Surely you have—”

  “Absolutely not! I have a marvelous secretary who handles all the wretched details of putting on an event. She thrives on it. My role is to stay to my rooms and keep out of the way.”

  Harriet got up and dumped her hoops. “How I loathe these things.”

  “I adore them,” Jemma said. “There’s nothing better than arranging huge swathes of silk just so; one always makes a grand entrance if one’s hoops are large enough. This season the fashion in Paris is for smaller panniers, which in itself was a good reason to leave.”

  Since Harriet loathed the idea of a grand entrance under any circumstances, and particularly with huge wire baskets attached to her sides, she changed the subject. “So who is Roberta, and what is her surname?”

  “Lady Roberta St. Giles. She’s great fun; I am persuaded the two of you will like each other enormously. The only problem is that she’s quite desperately in love and the man is rather unlikely.” She reached out toward the bellcord. “I’ll ask if she could join us, shall I? She’s been in fittings for a ballgown but perhaps she is finished.”

  But Harriet quickly waved her hand. “I want to ask you something first.”

  Jemma dropped the cord. “Of course.”

  “It’s—It’s about Benjamin.” Whenever she brought up her dead husband, people’s faces took on one of two expressions. If they knew only that she was a widow, their faces took on a practiced look of sympathy, often quite genuine. They would offer stories of aunts who were widowed and found true love a mere week afterward, as if she, Harriet, were lusting to marry over the very coffin of her husband.

  But if they knew that Benjamin committed suicide, their faces had an entirely different look: more guarded, more truly sympathetic, slightly horrified, as if suicide were a contagious disease. No one offered stories of relatives who put themselves to death.

  Jemma looked purely sympathetic.

  “He killed himself,” Harriet said bluntly. “He shot himself in the head after losing a game at which he gambled a great deal of money.”

  Jemma blinked at her for a moment. Then she jumped out of her chair and plumped down next to Harriet. Without panniers, the chair was more than wide enough for both of them. “That is absolutely terrible,” she said, wrapping an arm around her. “I’m so sorry, Harriet. No one told me.”

  Tears stung her eyes. “I’ve gotten used to it.”

  “Does one? I supposed I would get over my husband doing such a thing, simply because we aren’t very close to each other. But you and Benjamin—how could he do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know.” Despite herself her voice cracked a bit, and Jemma’s arm tightened. “He was so miserable. He was never good at being miserable.”

  “No, I think of him as always laughing.”

  “He was never very good at being formal, nor sad either. Nor ashamed of himself. He was ashamed of himself, and that’s why he did it.”

  “Over a game of cards! And why was he playing such high stakes?”

  “It wasn’t cards,” Harriet said. “It was chess.”

  “Chess!”

  Despite herself, a tear rolled down her cheek. Jemma produced a handkerchief from somewhere and blotted her cheek. Harriet almost smiled. It was the softest, most elegant little scrap of cloth she’d seen in years, pe
rhaps ever.

  “It’s mortifying to be crying for him,” she said, sniffing a bit.

  “Why? I would think you should wear your grief like a badge of honor. After all, you care enough to grieve. I can hardly imagine.”

  “It’s mortifying because he—he was so eager to leave me that he took his own life.” It came out angry.

  “That’s foolish, darling, and you know it. Your husband no more wished to leave you than he truly thought to give up life. I know Benjamin, remember? I was there when you fell in love.”

  “When I fell in love,” Harriet said, more angry tears swelling in her eyes. “If he was in love with me, he showed an odd way of displaying his passion.”

  “He did fall in love with you. But Benjamin was a remarkably impetuous person. I’m sure he regretted shooting himself the moment he did it, but it was too late. He just didn’t think clearly before acting.”

  “He should have thought about it!”

  “Was the chess game public?”

  “Of course. Chess is all the rage now. Everyone’s playing it, in the cafés, in private houses. White’s. Sometimes I think it’s all anyone talks about.”

  “How surprising. I had no idea. I thought it was only like that in France.”

  “Benjamin had a tremendous passion for chess. He couldn’t just play, you know? He had to be among the very best.”

  “But he wasn’t,” Jemma said sadly.

  “You remember that? Of course, you used to play him occasionally, didn’t you? Did he ever win?”

  Jemma shook her head.

  “He could beat most everyone,” Harriet said. “Truly. But he couldn’t bear the fact that he couldn’t beat the very top players. It was almost like a disease, the way he wanted to beat Villiers.”

  “It was Villiers he played at the last?” Jemma asked. “Villiers?”

  Harriet dashed away more tears. “Why are you so surprised? Villiers is the best chess player in England. Or so they say.”

  “It’s just very odd,” Jemma said slowly. “I’ve been talking of Villiers all morning.”