Desperate Duchesses

  Part of the problem was that she wasn’t concentrating on finding her way. Perhaps Jemma was right. An innocent dress was like a suit of armor, insuring that no one would remember that the Mad Marquess lived with his courtesan, which meant that she, Roberta, had lived in close proximity with that same woman. On the whole, Roberta felt that her friendships with her father’s companions had been interesting. But obviously, one might not wish to trumpet those acquaintances around a ballroom.

  She had climbed another flight of stairs, and was wandering down a sun-lit corridor lined with closed doors, which she thought might be taking her back to the central part of the house, when she heard a patter of feet.

  He burst around the corner going as fast as only a small boy can go.

  Roberta guessed immediately that this was Damon’s son, and decided there was no call to halt him. So she moved aside so that he could use the rest of the corridor as a race course, if he wished. But he skidded to a stop next to her.

  Pop went his thumb into his mouth.

  Roberta shuddered inwardly. She had had very little contact with children in her life, but she’d seen thumb-sucking in church. The very fact that someone would want to suck on a saliva-covered digit was disgusting.

  He was staring up at her, so she smiled. He wasn’t a terrible-looking child, just tousled. It seemed that no one had brushed his hair. Of course, there was no nanny.

  “Feel free to continue running,” she advised him.

  He just stared. And sucked.

  So she continued to walk. He walked right along beside her.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, trying to be friendly.

  “Teddy,” he said. In order to answer he took his thumb out with a “pop.”

  Roberta shuddered again. Enough polite conversation.

  But a moment later he dropped the thumb of his own volition and said, “Whatcha doing?”

  “Walking,” she said.

  “It’s running, I am,” he said.

  “I am running,” she corrected him. Perhaps that was a bit harsh, but after life with her father she had very little sympathy for inverted syntax, poetic or otherwise.

  “Right,” he said. At least he didn’t start sucking again. But he suddenly waxed eloquent. “Don’t have a nanny.”

  “I don’t have a nanny,” she repeated.

  “Right. The nanny, her name was Peg—”

  “The nanny’s name was Peg.”

  “Yes, her name was Peg and her brother was sent to Bridewell Prison because he stole a sow and her piglets and then he stole a butter churn and put the piglets in it.”

  He paused, but Roberta had no comment about the butter churn or the piglets, and his sentence was reasonably grammatical.

  So they continued like that down the hall and around the curve, with Roberta occasionally interjecting a grammatical comment, and Teddy telling her at length about various criminal deeds. Some of his stories were rather involved and, had Roberta not had a great deal of experience in decoding cryptic literature, might have been misinterpreted.

  “Do I understand you to say,” she said some time later, “that the housemaid with the beard, whose name is Carper, is married to a wild bog-trotting croggie, whatever that is, but she has a child by a Captain Longshanks?”

  Teddy corrected her. Apparently Carper had a mustache as well, and the signal point of his story was that she had more facial hair than the captain.

  To Roberta, the more interesting point was the wild bog-trotting croggie.

  Teddy admitted that he couldn’t describe Carper’s husband, but launched into a tale of Carper’s sister, who bought an ointment entitled the Tomb of Venus, which gave her a terrible swelling.

  “A dire name. She should have chosen something more propitious.”

  After she had explained the meaning of dire and propitious, and finally, tomb, Teddy said that the swelling was all in front, and Carper said that it was an ill-prepared medicine and that Dr. Jackson’s worm powder would have been better.

  Finally she saw the great winding stair leading down the central core of the house, so she told Teddy to run off to his nursery.

  He blinked up at her and then popped his thumb back in his mouth.

  “You’re too old for that,” she told him. “Why, you must be ten years old at the very least.”

  “Six,” he said around his thumb.

  “It’s a disgusting habit,” she said. “There are those who take worm powder and rub it in children’s thumbs and after that they never put them in their mouths again.”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  “Shoo,” she said. “Or I’ll tell your father about worm powder.”

  He ran.

  Chapter 6

  “An intimate family supper,” Jemma said with obvious satisfaction. “How I missed this while in Paris!”

  She was sitting at the head of the table, looking as enticing as a French bird of paradise and not at all like a good huswife. Damon grinned at her. “Domesticity is a new affectation for you.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “Beaumont, do you find that age is reconciling you to domesticity? You used to dine at home very rarely.”

  Beaumont was playing the majestic duke with particular fervor this evening; Damon couldn’t blame him after the scene this afternoon.

  “I shall, of course, make every effort to domesticate myself now that you have returned from Paris,” the duke said. His teeth closed around a bite of partridge with an audible snap.

  Damon hadn’t spent much time around feuding marital couples, but he judged the best thing to do was change the subject. Jemma beat him to it.

  “I suggest we exert ourselves to make a plan for Roberta’s marriage,” she said, throwing her new ward a smile.

  Damon didn’t see much need for a plan. Lady Roberta was wearing one of the most unattractive gowns Damon had ever seen, but she herself was utterly delicious. Beautiful, even given that gown. What made her devastating, though, was not her looks, but the mixture of naïveté and wit in her eyes.

  “After all,” Jemma said, warming up to her subject. “She has thrown me a challenge. Beaumont—”

  But her voice cut off and Damon saw that Beaumont had put down his fork and had picked up a sheaf of paper handed to him by a footman.

  “My deepest apologies,” he said. “I must answer this dispatch immediately. If you will forgive me, Your Grace, I will read it now, since this is such an informal family meal.” There was only the slightest chill of irony in his tone.

  “A challenge doesn’t quite cover it,” Damon said, throwing himself into the silence that billowed down the table from Jemma’s seat.

  “Am I such an antidote?” Roberta asked.

  “You’ll do,” he said, grinning at her. “The problem is Villiers.”

  “Surely the Duke of Villiers hasn’t married since January?”

  “Oh no,” Jemma said, dropping her wifely glare, presumably because her husband wasn’t paying the slightest attention. “Villiers is not married.”

  “Then?” Roberta asked.

  “Unmarriageable,” Damon said. She was a lovely little scrap, for all she’d fallen in love with the wrong man. “He’s a devil with women: beds them, leaves them.”

  “But surely—”

  “The problem is not that he’s strewn a few children around the place,” Jemma said. “Which he has. It’s that he got at least one of those children on a gentlewoman and still didn’t marry her. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Not likely to be attracted to a young miss, either,” Damon put in. Though he had to admit that Roberta appeared to be a long way from the milk-and-water misses he associated with the label.

  “I’m not a mere miss!” Roberta said, clearly revolted.

  “I think we are all happily coming to that realization,” Jemma said.

  “Reeves breed true,” Damon said. “Here, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you go to an inn and wait until a different fellow comes along to fall in love with? I
could drive up with my matched grays. Any number of people have fallen in love with them.”

  But she shook her head. “I will never love anyone but the Duke of Villiers.”

  Roberta was obviously head over heels; there was a thrill in her voice at the mention of Villiers. Damon took a bite of his partridge. Of course he wasn’t offended that she rejected his offer to replace Villiers out of hand. Not that he even got to make the offer.

  “The only thing I can think of is the old-fashioned ploy of putting Villiers in your way as much as possible, starting with the ball,” Jemma said. Her eyes were thoughtful. “In a way, this is the ultimate challenge: to marry off Villiers.”

  “The manly code of loyalty probably means I should warn him,” Damon said. “His days of peace are numbered.”

  “Villiers is everything I could wish for in a husband.” Roberta’s hands were clasped in her lap and she had a revolting look of adoration on her face.

  “You didn’t set yourself an easy task, did you?” Damon said, wanting to needle her. “Not only is he filthy rich, titled and one of the top chess players in England, if not the world—”

  “The only thing worse would be if you had fallen in love with Damon,” Jemma said, interrupting. “I can hardly believe it myself, but my brother is one of the most sought-after bachelors in London.”

  Damon didn’t care for his sister’s incredulous look. It was even more annoying to see an echo of it in Roberta’s eyes. “I was invited to the Cholmondelay ball, and had I attended, I would have fought off my admirers to dazzle you,” he told her.

  “Vanity is one of the seven deadly sins,” Roberta said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Lust is another,” he replied. “If I have one, I might as well have the other.”

  “From that point of view, one might think you indulge in gluttony as well.” She cast a nasty calculating eye at his waist, and his sister followed suit.

  “I don’t have to worry about that yet,” he told her. “Not like Villiers, who has to be on the far side of thirty. Likely getting a bit soft around the waist…just look at his hair.”

  “The sin of jealousy!” Jemma cried, clapping her hands.

  “I pick and choose my sins like my lovers,” Damon retorted. “Sloth yes, gluttony no. The more important point is that you,” he told Roberta, “are joining a pack of young women similarly lusting after Villiers, and will have to knock them out of your way somehow.”

  “Stop being pessimistic,” Jemma said. “I can’t imagine he is so sought-after. I haven’t seen Villiers for years, but there’s something almost feminine about him, isn’t there?”

  “No, there you’re wrong,” Damon said, at the same time that Roberta protested, “Not at all!”

  Jemma shrugged.

  “You’re used to obvious types,” Damon said. He cast a look at Beaumont, but the duke was deaf to the world, absorbed in his dispatch. “The kind who wears black, boxes for sport, knows his way around a stableyard and has broken a horse or two—or at least fibs about it.”

  “While I may not always defend my husband,” Jemma said, “if Beaumont ever said that he broke a horse, it would be the truth.”

  “I appreciate that,” Beaumont said suddenly. The gravity of his voice broke into their conversation like a bang of a judge’s gavel. He turned the page without looking up. “Please disregard my presence. I merely caught those critical words: my husband.”

  Jemma’s smile hardened. She turned to Roberta. “There was a very awkward moment early in our marriage when I asked my husband if he loved his mistress and he told me the truth.”

  Damon opened his mouth but Roberta rushed to the rescue. “I have spent much of my life listening to my father’s protestations of love,” she said. “I am extremely tired of men in love. It turns them to fools.”

  “If I ever told you that I was in love with my mistress,” Beaumont said, still not raising his eyes from the sheaf of papers before him, “I must have been mistaken.”

  Jemma ignored him. “I see just what you mean, Roberta. There is something unseemly about a man in love.”

  “Your father is a poet,” Damon said, “and if you’ll forgive me, Villiers is an altogether more complex creature. He’s intrigued by clothing, and likes to wear rose colors because they look splendid with his hair, which is going white. You did notice that, didn’t you?”

  “Shot through with silver,” Roberta said, her eyes dreamy again.

  Beaumont scrawled his signature with a huge flourish and a footman whisked away his papers. “Please forgive my intolerable rudeness,” he said, taking up his fork. “Do I gather that in between airing the intimacies of my early marriage, we are discussing the equally delightful topic of the Duke of Villiers?”

  “Precisely,” Damon said. “And Jemma, you are quite incorrect. Villiers may not flaunt his sword, so to speak, but it’s all the more evident for being sheathed.”

  “Are you saying that Villiers has fallen in love?” Beaumont asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

  “Never,” Damon said. “The man doesn’t give a damn about women, or propriety, the niceties of life in London, or any of that claptrap. He behaves in an egregious manner and yet he is invited everywhere. It’s one of the mysteries of life. Another such mystery would be how you, my dear Lady Roberta, are possibly going to get him to give a damn about you.”

  Jemma shot him a frown and Beaumont’s eyebrow shot up.

  Why the hell was he insulting Lady Roberta? Damon couldn’t quite explain it, but the idea of this delicious girl chasing after Villiers made his blood curdle.

  “I shall keep your good wishes in mind,” Roberta said, not turning a hair. “I think that the duke and I are suited.”

  “Suited!” Damon said. “Not unless you turn into a chess piece on alternate Sundays.”

  She didn’t even pause. “I can work on that.”

  “It’s going to be an education having you with us,” Jemma said. “Creativity must run in the family. Perhaps your father can write a poem for Damon’s wedding.”

  “What wedding?” he enquired.

  “The one I’m going to arrange for you. It’s past time you were married. It would have prevented the debacle of Flora’s declaration.”

  “I haven’t met a single young woman I could contemplate marrying. Most of the ones currently on the market have brains like the mills of God.” He sighed, faced with two blank female faces.

  “The mills of God grind exceedingly slowly,” Beaumont put in. “I gather Lord Gryffyn is issuing an obscure insult to young women’s intelligence.”

  “This is the very reason why you have reached the ripe, if not over-ripe, age of twenty-nine without marrying,” Jemma told her brother. “Your jokes are obscure, and your belief in your own intelligence is far too high.”

  “It has nothing to do with my intelligence,” he protested.

  “What does it have to do with?” Roberta asked with some curiosity. “Are you holding out for a bluestocking?”

  Jemma leaped to his rescue. “Damon’s problem is that he’s been the most eligible bachelor on the market for, oh, at least five years now.”

  “There was the Duke of Fletcher,” Damon put in gloomily, “but he married Perdita Selby and left me to the wolves.”

  “The wolves being matchmaking mamas,” Jemma translated.

  “And their daughters. It wasn’t Mrs. Hickman who had the idea of locking me in a privy with her daughter until we were compromised.”

  “It might have been Mr. Hickman,” Jemma said.

  He shook his head. “Elinor herself. She as good as told me so. After all, when you spend several hours in extremely intimate—and odiferous—circumstances, all sorts of revelations come to light.”

  “I can’t tell you how many young women have marked their first year in London by falling violently in love with my brother,” Jemma said.

  Roberta blinked at Damon.

  “I know,” Jemma said, “hard to believe, isn’t it?”

/>   “Somewhat,” Roberta said with a grin.

  “Don’t hesitate to insult me,” Damon retorted.

  “I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you were less than handsome,” Roberta said hastily.

  “It’s just as well that you’re immune to his charms. It would be all too awkward if you joined the slavering hordes and were chasing Damon around the house with a knife in one hand and a ring in the other.”

  “A knife?”

  “There was only one young lady with a cutting implement,” Damon said, “and it was some sort of chisel for working in stone. Young Dulcit Pensington. In her first few months in London, she succumbed to a particularly virulent affection for me, and was determined to carve my head in sandstone.”

  “How—” Roberta caught back whatever word she meant. Probably odd, Damon thought. “How enterprising!” she exclaimed.

  She obviously had no interest in him. Which was all to the best, just as Jemma had pointed out.

  “Dulcit is a very sweet girl,” Jemma said. “Not that I’ve seen her since she was a child, but I’m sure you have blown that chisel story out of all recognition, Damon.”

  “Not I,” he said promptly. “For at least two weeks I couldn’t leave my house without a maddened sculptress leaping from behind a bush, chisel in hand.”

  “Ignore him,” Jemma said to Roberta. “When a man grows this convinced of his own beauty, there is no hope for him.”

  “I am not convinced of my beauty,” Damon protested.

  “What you need is a woman who doesn’t even know you’re alive,” his sister told him. “I shall dance a hornpipe on the day you meet her.”

  “A fit encomium for marital bliss,” Beaumont said, putting down his knife and fork. “Dancing to a tune one neither likes nor understands, with a partner who thinks you a cadaver.”

  As jokes go, that wasn’t a bad one, though of course family loyalty meant that Damon couldn’t laugh. Jemma was glaring again. Damon looked over at Roberta and saw an answering, secret smile in her eyes.

  It seemed he could share a secret laugh with his new family member, which was comforting when he thought of sitting through more dinners like this one.