Duchess by Night

  “He didn’t love me,” Harriet said.

  “I can only identify a man in lust,” Jemma said. “I have no idea how reliable Isidore is in these matters.”

  “He was in lust,” Harriet said, hiccupping. “But I thought he loved me.” The words wrenched out of the bottom of her heart. “His daughter got sick, and he asked me to be there with her. And I thought—I thought it was because—I’m such a fool!”

  “What?” Jemma said, rocking her a little.

  “I thought he was thinking of me as being Eugenia’s mother.”

  “I’m sure he was thinking that,” Jemma said.

  “I was good enough,” Harriet said, “at least while I had my trousers on. He said we could kill off Harry Cope, and then he’d marry Harriet, and I could go right back to playing primero with the men every night.”

  “A fool,” Jemma diagnosed.

  “And then when I said I was leaving, and I even—I even begged him to come with me, but he wouldn’t. He was so angry with me. He said I was a typical duchess, that I thought he was a toy that could be bought. It wasn’t like that, it really wasn’t like that.”

  She was crying so hard now that she bent over at her waist, arms wrapped around herself, crying in big ugly gulps and odd noises.

  “I loved him and he didn’t love me enough,” she said, her voice wavering. “And I’m sick—I’m so sick of always being second rate, of never being enough. The moment he found out I was a duchess it all just changed.”

  “Oh,” Jemma said, softly. Her hand paused for a moment, stroking Harriet’s hair. “People always treat duchesses differently,” she said. “A duchess is the highest in the land. There are many men who would never even flirt with a duchess.”

  “He didn’t have to flirt with me,” Harriet said, sitting upright again and wiping her nose. “He just had to marry me! And then I wouldn’t be a duchess anymore. I’d be plain Lady Strange.”

  “Maybe he wanted to but he couldn’t imagine it,” Jemma suggested.

  “He didn’t love me enough. And you know? I’m tired of people who don’t love me enough,” Harriet said, her voice rising. “I’m not so terribly second rate. I’m really not like Mother Goose. I’ll never be as beautiful as you, Jemma, but I am beautiful. I am. I look best in boy’s clothing, but—but he saw me in boy’s clothing. And I look really good with no clothes at all!”

  Jemma chuckled. “I believe you.”

  “I’m smart. Maybe not as smart as you—” Her voice stopped. “Oh God, listen to me. I said it myself. You are beautiful and intelligent, and I’m just good enough, and smart enough.”

  “I really don’t have much intelligence,” Jemma said matter-of-factly. “I can’t figure out much except chess, for example. And how far has that got me? I have won a lot of chess matches. And where am I because of it?” The bitterness in Jemma’s voice silenced Harriet for a moment.

  “Chess didn’t stop my husband from having a mistress. Chess didn’t stop me from ruining the prospect of our possible happiness by retaliating and bedding a man. Chess didn’t make Elijah love me, or care what I was doing in France. Chess won’t do anything.” Her tone was fierce. “There’s nothing special about a head for chess.”

  Harriet blew her nose.

  “Strange is a fool,” Jemma said. “You are wonderfully intelligent, and gorgeous clothed and unclothed, and you don’t even play chess—what more could a man want? You would have been loyal to him—”

  “I would kill him if he took a mistress,” Harriet said fiercely. “I started to think about him taking a lover on the way home and I almost turned around the carriage.”

  “See what he gave up?” Jemma said. “The potential of being married to someone who loved him enough to become homicidal. You have a broken heart but broken hearts do mend. You are free to find a man who knows exactly what a intelligent, beautiful person you are.”

  Harriet sniffed.

  There didn’t seem to be much more to say on the subject, so after a time they both retired to their rooms.

  Harriet fell onto her bed and waited for a tide of misery to wash over her—but it didn’t.

  Instead she kept thinking that she deserved better. Anger made it too hard to lie still, so she leapt to her feet and walked the room. She deserved someone to love her.

  She wasn’t second rate, she really wasn’t. Perhaps she was clumsy in panniers, but Jem didn’t know that. What he knew was that she was nimble at fencing.

  And perhaps she looked like a partridge in women’s clothing—but again, he didn’t know that. He’d seen her at her best. And she felt beautiful, those times when they made love. Even thinking about their afternoon in the barn made her feel a little teary—and very angry. What was he doing, throwing away something as precious as what they had?

  She almost dissolved into tears, remembering the way he cupped her face, and said that he’d make love to her in the stable on her eightieth birthday.

  The crucial thing was that she had said—she had actually managed to say that she loved him. She’d begged him not to leave her.

  And he had still let her go.

  That was the only thing that mattered, not how he felt about her being a duchess, or whether he thought she was a liar, or those other things he said.

  It was like a cold knife, but it was also good. If she’d had the time to beg Benjamin not to leave her, he would have done so anyway. She knew that. But she would have liked the chance to tell him one last time that she loved him.

  It was the same thing all over again, except that Jem was alive, presumably sitting around at the Game, flirting with the Graces…

  It was the same thing, all over again.

  He was dead to her.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  The Definition of Manhood, Under Discussion Again

  March 21, 1784

  It was time for the Game, so Jem made his way to the study. Lord Brouncker arrived with news of a great quarrel between the East India Company and a man named Stallybrass, which was inflaming both Houses of Parliament. Jem didn’t care.

  He bet wildly and without interest. He ended up betting that Fox would not prevent passage of the Mutiny Bill, even though he hated engaging in that sort of random expenditure of money.

  The Game dissolved into nothing more than a series of drunken reminiscences, all of which had to do with a certain opera singer named Noelle Gray who seemed to have a generous temperament, to say the least.

  Jem could hardly control his irritation.

  Villiers was smiling his secret little smile across the table. It provoked him, so he said belligerently, “What?”

  “I was maintaining a dignified silence,” Villiers observed.

  “Distasteful,” Jem snapped. “Gentlemen, shall we have another hand?”

  “Noo,” Brouncker said, shaking his head. “Can’t manage it. My stomach’s upset. Might shoot the cat.”

  Jem decided never to invite that idiot again. He looked around the room. He didn’t want to see any of these men again, with their belching and pettiness. Lord Oke was peeing against the wall again, though he knew perfectly well that there were chamber pots in the hall. Now he would pretend that he saw—

  “Damme if I didn’t see a chamber pot there but a moment ago!” Oke roared.

  “Missing something?” Villiers asked.

  The tone of his voice was nicely calibrated to sting. Jem turned and snapped at him. “If you wish to say something, just do so. Be a man, for once.”

  “Isn’t that really the subject at hand? What is a man, after all?” Villiers asked softly. He was magnificently dressed in a flared coat of raspberry, edged with an elaborate braided twill. He had his hair tied back and unpowdered, of course. Only fools like Oke bothered to powder their hair for the Game.

  “A man,” Jem said, “is not a woman.”

  “Concise.”

  “Men are not fools who—”

  “Who?”

  “Who turn out to be what they are not.”


  “Ah, the beauty of your logic,” Villiers said amiably. “Really. I marvel at it.” He leaned closer. “I miss Harriet. She showed remarkable spirit for someone of her sex.”

  “And rank.”

  “Ah,” Villiers said, sitting back. “And therein we have the serpent in the Garden of Eden, do we?”

  “You must admit there is some discrepancy in how she was presented to me.”

  “I have never been one to overlook rank,” Villiers said, waving his hand. He wore a ruby on one finger.

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “And yet if I judge Harriet correctly, one could not say that she takes rank as seriously as do I—and oddly enough, as you appear to do.”

  “I thought she was the widow of a country squire,” Jem said, scrubbing his face with his hands. He might as well tell Villiers. “I thought I’d be doing her a favor, by taking her out of a dreary country existence.”

  Villiers laughed.

  “Exactly,” Jem said. “More the fool I.”

  “The duchy of Berrow is no small hamlet,” Villiers said.

  “Berrow?” Jem’s head shot up. “Berrow?”

  “What duchy did you think we were discussing?”

  “I never asked.”

  “There aren’t very many of us,” Villiers observed. His ruby ring seemed to wink at Jem.

  “Her husband…”

  “Benjamin.”

  “He came to the Game once,” Jem said.

  “You never invited him again,” Villiers guessed.

  “No. He wasn’t really interested.”

  “Benjamin was one of my dearest friends, though I didn’t understand that until after his death. One can make terrible mistakes when it comes to love, you know.”

  Jem ground his teeth. The last thing he needed was a lecture from someone famous for spawning illegitimate children. “You are an unlikely font of such wisdom,” he said.

  “I couldn’t agree more. I have never been in love with a woman, for example.”

  Jem looked at him startled.

  “No, nor yet a man,” Villiers said, shaking his head. “But I have loved. Here and there, here and there. I know the worth of the emotion.”

  “I loved Sally,” Jem said.

  But Villiers had known him for years, since those long-ago days, and he said nothing.

  “All right, I didn’t love her in the same way. But Harriet is a duchess.”

  “We established that.” Villiers pushed his small glass of claret toward Jem with one finger. “Here. I haven’t touched it.”

  Jem looked at his own empty glass and picked up Villiers’s, cradling it in his hand. “She is a good woman. A decent woman. She said the Game would have to stop, and I’d have to follow her. But she has no idea. She knows nothing of my family.”

  “Pesky things, families.”

  “My reputation would ruin her. She’d come to hate me.”

  “I suppose you are saying that I must give up the chance of falling in love as well?”

  “Why would you?” Jem tossed back the claret.

  “Oh, I do have some children out of wedlock, you know. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “What, only the daughter that you’ve tended so carefully? It shows a shockingly conservative turn of mind, Strange.”

  Jem snorted.

  “I suppose you are saying that due to my notorious lack of interest in my illegitimate offspring, and my accompanying reputation, that I must never fall in love?” Villiers’s question was delicately barbed.

  “You don’t follow. I can’t—the Game…”

  “Ah, the Game.” Villiers glanced around the room. It smelled of urine, thanks to Oke, and the air was redolent of cheroot smoke. “A charming tradition.”

  “I’ve fixed the majority of my contracts here. I—”

  “Of course, one can always use more substance,” Villiers said. “I wonder how my estates keep multiplying when I give them so little attention.”

  Jem shot him a look of extreme dislike.

  “I would guess that Harriet does not care for the Graces, and the other ladies of their ilk.” He raised a finger at a footman, who bounded forward and brought him another glass of claret.

  “It’s not that she disdains them,” Jem said, taking another deep swallow of wine.

  “She doesn’t want to breakfast with them? I must admit that Chloe’s laughter was making me tetchy earlier this evening. That story she told at dinner, about the bishop and the champagne bath. Hardly in good taste, don’t you think? Especially with those details—it was his miter she was talking about, wasn’t she?”

  Jem took another swallow.

  “No good woman has ever loved me,” Villiers said, putting down his glass with a little ring. “I was engaged, you know. Last year.”

  “I heard.”

  “Beautiful girl. She fell in love with the Earl of Gryffyn and dropped me. Do you know how I found out? Because she looked at him that way. There was a sort of look in her eyes.”

  “What sort of look?”

  He shrugged. “I see it now and then.”

  Jem knew where Villiers had seen it. In Harriet’s eyes, when she looked at him. “I know Harriet loves me,” he said roughly. “But it would ruin her life, don’t you understand that?”

  “And they always say that women are the more sacrificial sex,” Villiers said. “How touching all this recrimination is. I wish that Roberta had seen her way to such a sacrifice, but she went off and married Gryffyn anyway. I do believe they are most happy together.”

  Jem grunted.

  “I thought perhaps Miss Charlotte Tatlock might fall in love with me,” Villiers said. “She paid me visits while I was ill.”

  “For God’s sake, you sound like a pitifiul case.”

  “One thing about nearly dying is that you quite lose the wish to disguise your own weaknesses,” Villiers observed.

  Jem silently thanked God he was feeling healthy.

  “Miss Tatlock fell in love with my heir,” Villiers said.

  “You’re cursed in love,” Jem said. “Next thing you’re going to tell me that you have your eye on Harriet.”

  Villiers said nothing.

  Jem felt a punishing heat rising in his chest. “You’re joking, right?” he said in a stifled voice.

  “No one could not have his eye on Harriet,” Villiers said, looking back to Jem. “She’s utterly delicious, as you well know, especially in breeches. Do you know that she and I almost had an affaire once?”

  Jem thought he might vomit. He shook his head.

  “I approached her but she slapped me. She was married then, of course.”

  “I thought you just said that Benjamin was one of your closest friends.”

  “Annoying, isn’t it? I just seem to have the kind of constitution that simply can’t pay attention to the claims of friends. If you had a claim on Harriet, for instance, I would do my best. But of course,” he added gently, “you haven’t.”

  Jem gave him a leaden-eyed look. “Stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Your ham-handed attempts to manipulate me.”

  “Dear me,” Villiers said, sipping his wine. “I must be losing my touch.”

  “If—if I go after Harriet it won’t be because I’m afraid that you’ll snatch her up. She wouldn’t have you, anyway.”

  “A terrible blow,” Villiers murmured. “It takes a friend to dash one to the ground.”

  “She—” He stopped.

  “I suppose it could be that she loves you, and therefore she would reject me,” Villiers concluded. “How unfortunate, under the circumstances. Luckily, I am used to the circumstance. Well, I must to bed. This has been an utterly charming conversation, Strange.” He rose and bowed, magnificently.

  “Jem,” Strange said, looking up at him.

  “Dear me. First names are so very intimate. In that case, my name is Leopold, but I’ll thank you not to use it.”

  “Leopold,” Jem sai
d, trying the name out. “It suits you, in a emperor-ish type of way.”

  “I dislike it,” Villiers said.

  “You must call me Jem. So much advice and delivered with such poisonous precision…we must be the best of friends.”

  Villiers paused for a moment, and a smile warmed his wintry eyes. “Indeed,” he said. “That is my impression.”

  He turned with a swirl of his magnificent coat, and was gone.

  Brouncker was sick in the corner.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The Origins of Paradise

  March 22, 1784

  “Harriet said I could visit her,” Eugenia reported. “I can, can’t I, Papa? I know she has kittens in the barn, because she told me so.”

  “Of course.”

  Eugenia climbed up onto his lap, and Jem’s heart thumped when he felt how light she was still. “Did you have a big lunch?” he demanded.

  “Stew,” Eugenia said. “And a special egg that Cook made me.”

  “What was special about it?”

  “It has a very fancy cheese called fromage bleu mixed into it,” Eugenia reported.

  “You eat like a lady of eighty,” Jem said, tightening his arm around her.

  “I like fromage,” Eugenia said, obviously relishing the sound of the French syllables on her tongue. “I like Harry too. Or Harriet. I miss her.”

  “I miss her too.” In fact, the pain of missing her was almost like a physical pain in his chest. He couldn’t imagine how to get through yet another day.

  “I thought she might stay with us,” Eugenia said.

  He cleared his throat. “I hoped she would too, poppet. But she’s a duchess, and she had important things to do.”

  “I asked her what they were.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She kind of laughed, and said that people on her estate needed taking care of, the same as your people do. And that she had a very old dog, who would miss her. His name is Mrs. Custard.”

  Jem opened his mouth—and shut it again.

  Harriet had a very old dog waiting for her. She was going back to an empty house. It hit him like a brick in the head.

  Eugenia was looking at him with concern. “Don’t worry, Papa,” she said sweetly. “I’ll never let you be all alone. When I grow up, I’ll have a house and you can stay with me.”