Duchess by Night

  He looked angry again. Obviously, something about her made him peevish. Harriet thought about ill manners all the way down the staircase. Benjamin used to feel free to be very ill-mannered as well.

  But she had been trained that a lady should never exert her moods over other people. And she had adhered to that plan for years, never snapping at the people who obliquely blamed her for Benjamin’s suicide, no matter how pestilently rude she felt they were being.

  Strange leapt onto his horse with a sort of boyish enthusiasm that she found attractive, despite herself.

  Or perhaps it was the way the muscles in his legs bulged when he settled on the horse.

  That was one thing about attending a party notorious for its illicit liaisons: the atmosphere lent itself to frank assessments of bodily charms. There was a great deal about Lord Strange that Harriet found attractive.

  When they reached the beginning of the road, Strange rose slightly in his stirrups, bringing his horse to a trot. Harriet eyed him from behind, and revised her opinion. What she felt went beyond attraction.

  She felt almost helpless in the face of the desire she felt. It was…ravenous. As if she would do anything to caress him, to touch him.

  And never mind the fact that he thought she was an effeminate male whose company he could hardly stand.

  She gathered up her reins and urged her horse to a trot. Not to put too fine a point on it, the first blow of the saddle as the horse started trotting made her want to scream. But she wedged her boots into the stirrups and tried to hover above the saddle. It worked—kind of. It was much better once her horse lengthened her stride and started galloping. She bounced along in opposite rhythm to the horse and it wasn’t nearly as painful.

  In fact, she actually found herself leaning over the horse’s neck and beginning to enjoy herself, barring the icy wind whistling in her teeth and squealing in her ears.

  Strange waited for her at the end of the road. Harriet pulled up her horse, her chest heaving.

  “Better,” he said. He wheeled his horse and started back the way he came.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Harriet muttered, staring after him. Didn’t he say yesterday that the horses needed to walk after a gallop? Finally she took out after him. If she paused even for a moment, the cold ate at her bones. The ground whirled by at her feet, frozen clods of brown earth flying from the horse’s hooves, thin ice cracking.

  It felt wonderful.

  Her heart was pounding, blood thumping through her veins. She suddenly realized that she hadn’t felt this alive in—oh—years.

  Since Benjamin died, perhaps before Benjamin died. It was as if she had been living in cotton wool, and suddenly the wooly blanket lifted and the world flared out around her, brilliant, full of life, color, and movement. A jay started out from a bush; she caught the tail of a rabbit bounding under a hedgerow.

  At the entrance to Strange’s drive, she hauled on the reins. Her mare had enjoyed the run, and slowed to a walk with a few graceless, stiff-legged movements that jolted every one of Harriet’s bruises. But she was too interested in Strange’s house to do more than wince.

  It was the first time she’d really looked at it. It was a child’s drawing of a country house, a castle and a house in one. Part of it gleamed in proper Portland stone, but the bit to the right looked like the left-over parts of a medieval castle without a turret.

  Then there was a wing extending to the left that sprawled low to the ground, with greenhouses sprouting from it like spokes on a wheel. And finally there was a tower-like affair that must be the famous reproduction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa—except she didn’t think the famous Italian tower leaned quite this much. It was made of brick, with a little brass peaked hat on top.

  It looked dangerous.

  A smoky voice said, “You’re frowning at my tower. Would you like to see it?”

  “You really did design that?”

  For the first time since she’d met him, Strange’s eyes lit up with something more than lazy appreciation or sarcasm.

  “Let’s take a look.” And without waiting for an answer, he directed his horse through the archway.

  Harriet shook her freezing fingers and picked up the reins.

  Up close, the tower was made of bricks, with a wooden door. It leaned in an alarming fashion. In fact, it didn’t exactly lean: it toppled. It looked like a tree forced out over the edge of a cliff by repeated winter storms. It looked like a drunk man falling to the ground.

  It looked, in short, like certain death.

  Strange was already off his horse and unlocking the door when Harriet arrived.

  “Come on,” he said over his shoulder, disappearing inside.

  Harriet looked down. She had never dismounted without assistance. Ladies didn’t. And Nick, her favorite groom, who had boosted her into place with plenty of whispered bits of advice that morning, was nowhere to be seen.

  Grunting a little from her sore muscles, she pulled her right boot out of the stirrup and tried to slide to the ground.

  She ended up falling with a wallop onto the frozen ground just as Strange came back into the doorway.

  She quickly scrambled to her feet.

  “You’re the worst horseman I’ve ever seen,” he said, in a not unfriendly tone of voice. “And yet you ride quite well in a neck-or-nothing sort of way. Didn’t your mother let you on a horse?”

  “My—” Harriet said, before remembering that Villiers had given her a sickly mother in the country. “My mother is afraid of horseflesh,” she said. “What shall I do with the reins?”

  “Just put them down. My horses are extremely well trained. You see how my horse is simply waiting for me? Yours will do the same.”

  Harriet put the reins down and stepped back. Her horse, being no fool, instantly decided that she would rather be in the nice snug stables, and set off in that direction.

  In a hurry.

  Harriet didn’t see any need to comment on it, so she walked past Strange, leaving him muttering some interesting curse words behind her.

  She stopped short inside the tower. It was one round room, and rather than having floors, the ceiling simply receded and receded, so Harriet felt dizzy when she looked up and saw the roof veering off to the left.

  The room was hung with great swaths of watered apricot silk. It had only two pieces of furniture: a large bed hung with matching gauze, and a solid oak desk piled with papers. It looked like an odd cross between a Turkish harem and the chambers of a solicitor.

  Her mouth fell open.

  “Isn’t it interesting?” Strange said, appearing next to her. “I pressured the vector to the most extreme that it could manage in terms of weight-bearing.”

  “It’s like looking up a crooked chimney pipe,” Harriet said, ignoring the bed and looking upward again.

  “If you calculate the angles, Cope, you’ll see that I achieve around a sixty-three-percent lean by fifty percent of the extension. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s dangerous,” Harriet said bluntly.

  “It’s not dangerous. I calculated the weight of the bricks very carefully against the slant of the tower.”

  “I’m sure you did. It’s dangerous.”

  “It’s not dangerous,” he said in a controlled voice that told her other sensible souls had pointed out the same thing. “The servants don’t like to come near, and so I allow them their foibles. But any educated man has to recognize that the science of engineering dictates exactly what a building can and cannot do, in terms of angles.”

  “No windows?” Harriet enquired.

  “They altered the weight-bearing properties of the bricks.”

  In other words, Harriet translated, the whole thing would have collapsed into a pile of dust.

  “The tower in Pisa has been standing since the 1170s,” Strange said. He strode over and struck a flint to light a lantern hanging from a little hook. It cast a golden light over his shoulders that served to remind Harriet how cold she was.

>   When she didn’t say anything to affirm his brilliance in tower-building, he added: “In the summer, Eugenia and I often picnic here.”

  She swung around from examining a couple of bricks she was sure were about to crumble into each other. “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Your daughter should never be in this tower. Ever. It’s one thing if you want to put your own life at risk—” and mine, she added silently “—but your daughter should not come within a hundred feet of this building.”

  He looked at her with a scowl. “Villiers tells me that you spent your life so far under the wing of your mother. I don’t mean to be rude, Cope, but if you want to be a goer, you’ll have to stop parroting your mother.” He imitated her voice. “It’s too cold. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Do you think it makes you more dashing to put a child in danger? How interesting that you don’t force the servants to risk their lives in your creation. I really should make notes. To wit: manhood, achieved by risking nurslings but not underlings.”

  “You are an ass,” he bit out.

  Harriet felt a thrill. No man had ever called her an ass. No doubt Benjamin thought she was an ass, but he would never say such a thing to a lady.

  “You too,” she said cordially. He seemed shocked at the broad smile she gave him. “Don’t ever allow your daughter in this tower, or near it, again. You love her too much. Why risk a broken heart?”

  She caught his eye just long enough to make sure her words sank in and then stepped back out into the frosty air.

  “One final point,” she said. “That room is kitted up like a brothel. While it’s enterprising of you to recreate that charming atmosphere on your own grounds, why on earth would you introduce your child to it?”

  A look of pure rage crossed his face. “It’s not a brothel.”

  “Did you pick those hangings yourself?”

  “No, I—” He bit the words off.

  “Let me guess,” she said, enjoying herself enormously. “You asked for help from a London firm whose last employment was in a courtesan’s boudoir.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Well?”

  “Miss Bessie LaMott arranged for the hangings,” he said through gritted teeth. “I certainly didn’t think of it as a brothel.”

  “I expect Bessie just reproduced the environment she knew best,” Harriet said kindly.

  He strode over to his horse and said, “You’ll have to ride behind me.”

  Harriet took a look at his lean, muscled body and felt a qualm that had nothing to do with being a man, and everything to do with being a woman. “I can walk. I feel much warmer, just from being out of the wind for a bit.”

  “Nonsense. Eugenia will be waiting to watch our fencing lesson.” From his tone, he couldn’t wait to face her with a sword in his hand. Strange swung into his saddle and then looked at her. “I suppose you can’t get up without assistance.”

  He didn’t seem to want to touch her, which was a little hurtful. But Harriet was starting to shiver all over, so she just shook her head.

  He stuck out his hand. She went over to him, put her hand in his, and then looked up. “What next?”

  He was staring down at their hands. Her hand was engulfed in his, of course. “What next?” she repeated. “Should you take your foot out of the stirrup so I can get up?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said.

  He gave a great heave. She flew through the air and landed just behind his saddle with a muffled shriek. The horse’s rump sloped backward, so she edged forward until she was actually sitting on the raised end of his saddle. It caused her to be plastered against his back, but at least there she had a chance of staying on the horse.

  “Let go of my shoulders!” he said irritably.

  “I clutched them in an effort to stop myself flying into the next county,” she managed.

  “You scream like a woman,” he said, obviously disgusted.

  She had the impulse to pinch him hard, but she controlled it. The horse didn’t even seem to notice her weight. He was prancing, eager to return to the stables. “You left your horse standing in the cold after a run,” she said pointedly.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” he said, his voice rueful. “Horses, servants, children. I’m afraid that I get excited by this sort of thing.”

  “Towers?”

  “The engineering that goes into them. The calculations. The other day I figured out how we could put a false floor in the ballroom.”

  Harriet let a moment go by before she asked the obvious. “And the false floor would be good for?”

  “For a banquet table,” he said. “It would have been interesting, but I’m afraid that Eugenia has your hard-headed approach. I threw the calculations away.”

  He was terrifyingly likeable when he was rueful and in love with his crazed engineering feats.

  “Do you have to sit so close to me?” he asked, with an edge in his voice that made her forget that she ever liked him.

  “How exactly do you think that I’m supposed to sit behind you, on the saddle, without being close?”

  “Try moving backwards,” he said, very unfriendly. “There’s a nice space of the horse’s rear to sit on.”

  “I can’t do it,” Harriet said, enjoying herself. So he didn’t like her because she was too effeminate? Rank prejudice. Why, her mother’s curate, Mr. Periwinkle, was remarkably effeminate. He smelled like a flower and believed that life was always better with a cup of tea. Lord Strange probably wouldn’t want to shake his hand.

  She snuggled closer. It was good for him to feel uncomfortable. In fact, she would be grinning except her face was too frozen to move. It would be good for Lord Strange if he had to get to know someone—a man—who was a little different than he was.

  The man was set in his ways. Obsessed with manliness. Mr. Periwinkle enjoyed arranging dried flowers. And he gave lovely sermons about the lilies of the field. Everyone adored him.

  The horse started climbing the hill toward the front of the house. “You don’t mind if I put my arms around you, do you?” she shouted against the wind.

  “What?”

  So she just put her arms around his waist.

  His body stiffened.

  Her grin died a moment later. Strange’s body was large and fierce and male, in a way that played fiddlesticks with her pleasure in Mr. Periwinkle’s company.

  She could feel coiled muscle and steel, even through his greatcoat. It was dangerous to have her hands on him. It felt like nothing she’d experienced before. It felt heady, warm, crazed. It made her think about the bawdy songs in Kitty’s book, the ones that talked about a woman folding a man in her arms and kissing him over and over.

  It must be the influence of Strange’s degenerate household, with Kitty and Nell and all the rest of them pursuing their desires without the slightest concern for consequences, or reputation, or society. If she weren’t a duchess…

  If she were just Mr. Cope, young Harry who had no last responsibilities and no history, she would throw away caution.

  She would…

  The horse stopped in the courtyard and Strange was off the horse so fast that she slid forward onto the saddle, into the space left by his warm body. He looked up at her, his eyebrow cocked disdainfully.

  She looked back at him steadily until the scorn faded in his eyes.

  “Do you still wish to fence?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He turned away, and Nick came running toward her.

  “I was that worried when your horse came home alone, miss,” he whispered.

  “I’m all right. It was Strange’s fault; he told me to drop the reins because his horses were so perfectly trained that they would stay in place.”

  “Well, there’s some that will do it,” the boy said fairly. “But not many in this weather. So you didn’t fall off, then?”

  “No, and your tips helped. I think I know how to manage a gallop, though trotting is a terri
ble thing to endure.”

  “Perhaps we could get up really early one morning and I could show you how to manage a trot.”

  “I’d hate to get you up so early,” she said.

  “I’m already up. But night may be better. That way you wouldn’t be riding with me, and then with Lord Strange. He might notice. But we should start with mounting a horse. It’s a miracle he hasn’t seen the way you climb your mount like a rocky hillside.”

  “Perhaps even tonight?”

  “I’ll wait for you in the stables. There’s generally no one around so it should be safe.”

  She gave him a quick smile. “Thank you!”

  Strange was waiting for her at the door. “You’re very friendly with that stable boy.” His tone was unfriendly again.

  “His name is Nick, and I like him,” she said, walking past Strange to get into the warmth.

  “You like him?” Strange said.

  She glanced back at him. “He’s nice.” But the only thing on her mind was how to get warm without losing her manhood. “If you’ll forgive me, I’m going to take a piss.” She managed to walk half the way up the stairs, but then broke into a run. When she got to her chamber she dashed across the room and dove under the quilt, leaving only her boots sticking off the bed.

  “Your Grace,” Lucille exclaimed, coming over. “Are you all right? Are you ill?”

  “Cold,” Harriet said with chattering teeth. “So cold.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Lucille clucked. She ran over and got another quilt and piled it on top of Harriet. “You’ll be catching your death, riding around on a morning like this. Why, the Duchess of Cosway isn’t even out of her bed yet. She’s just breakfasting.”

  “You can have my hot chocolate,” Isidore said, appearing in the doorway. “Have you been pounding around on freezing roadways for hours?”

  “Ye-ess,” Harriet said from under the covers. “My horse went home alone and I had to ride behind Strange and it was so cold.”

  “Sit up and drink this chocolate,” Isidore said. “The cup is nice and hot.”

  Harriet finally did, gratefully curling her fingers around the mug.

  “What’s next in the life of a gentleman?” Isidore asked.

  “Fencing again,” Harriet said. “Fighting with rapiers. He makes me take my jacket off and it’s bloody cold up there in those galleries. The man must have cold blood, like a reptile.”