“Did she die soon after?” Harriet finally ventured.
“Oh, no. She’s not dead.”
She put her head on his chest, but he just kept stroking her hair. “You really may not wish to marry me,” he said finally. “And—”
She reared up her head. “You’d let me walk away?”
There was a smile in his eyes. “I’m a reprobate to do this to you.”
She rolled over on top of him, as if he were a mattress. “You are everything to me, Jem Strange. Don’t you dare try to send me away again. Ever.”
“My sister owns a small, quite select brothel in Belfast, Antrim County, Ireland. She’s quite happy, or so she says in letters. It’s called the Ladybird,” he added.
“The Ladybird!”
“I’m sorry I reacted so badly when you labeled my guests ladybirds. They are, of course.”
Harriet stayed quite still for a moment as the truth of Jem’s life became clear to her. “How could you not include them?” she said fiercely. “I didn’t understand. You are a wonderful man, do you know that? I’m proud of you.”
His mouth twisted. “What’s there to be proud of?”
“You have never turned away a woman who reminded you of your sister, did you?”
He swallowed. “No.”
“Is your father alive?”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to say that he died of parental guilt?” The twist to his mouth made Harriet’s throat burn. “He died four years ago, after drinking too much and deciding to prove that he could walk along the top of the stone fence that surrounded his kitchen garden in Bath. He couldn’t.”
She kissed him again.
“But I realized after you left that I created Fonthill for him…It was he who told me, my whole childhood, that a house full of loose women, a brothel, is a man’s paradise.”
“You created the house, but you never took advantage of that aspect of it,” Harriet said slowly.
“I don’t feel comfortable taking advantage of women who must trade their favors for their next meal.”
Harriet put her head back down on his chest and listened to the steady beat of his heart. “We can still help women in distress,” she said. “In every way possible. Just perhaps not in our very house.”
“After you left, I realized that Fonthill had virtually become a brothel. I have a brothel. I who never willingly entered a brothel, not since my father forced me into my first one at age thirteen.”
“Fonthill is not a brothel,” Harriet said.
“Close enough.” His voice was bleak.
“Not,” she said firmly, sitting up so she could look in his eyes. “Your sister runs a brothel. You do not. You had a wonderful, exuberant house party to which you invited all sorts of people, from scientists to singers. And if some of them found friendships under your roof, you never profited from that. They did.”
He was silent.
“The Game was not dependent on female entertainment,” she said gently.
“I’m a damned poor bargain, Harriet,” he said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
She couldn’t even speak: her heart was too full. “You are—” she swallowed “—mine. At the heart I’m a tedious country widow.”
He rolled over so fast that her words disappeared into his lips. “You are my Harriet, the most intelligent, funny, wise soul I have ever met. And, though it hardly matters, the one person who has ever driven me utterly mad with lust for your beauty.”
She couldn’t help smiling up at him. “Do you want a similar catalogue?”
He shook his head. “I don’t care about any of that, if you think—” But he couldn’t put it in words.
“You are everything to me,” she whispered, tears in her eyes. “I love every bit of you, from the wrinkles by your eyes, to your crazed architectural plans, to your generosity and your sweetness. You are a wonderful father, who never dishonored your own father by disowning his idea of paradise—and yet you kept Eugenia warm and safe and loved. You welcome every woman with your sister’s background, and yet you never took advantage of them. How could I not love you, Jem?”
She was crying now, and he was kissing her. But he had something to say too, so he made her stop crying and listen to him.
“Benjamin was a fool, Harriet. A fool. I’ve never met another woman with your joy, your beauty, and your sensuality. But what I love most is your deep-down sense of fairness, the clear judgment that allows you to see people as they are, whether they are criminals or fools like myself, Villiers or Nell…”
There didn’t really seem to be much else to be said.
So they talked with their hands. And their lips.
And finally, with the greatest gift of all. With their bodies.
Epilogue
Eugenia Strange’s arm was starting to tire. Her little brother was much heavier than he looked. He was lolling back in her arm now, looking as if he were about to fall into his nap and yet he never seemed to actually do it. It was awfully frustrating.
Sure enough, the moment she stopped walking he opened his eyes and smiled gummily at her. Colin had his mother’s velvety brown eyes. Since he was wearing a little blue shirt, they had a tinge of violet.
“All the ladies are going to be in love with you,” she told him.
He sighed and closed his eyes. “You’re right,” Eugenia said. “It is a bit tiresome, all this adoration.” For example, she happened to know that right now there were eight gentlemen in the drawing room. Povy kept popping his head into the nursery and holding up his fingers silently to give her the new count.
But she hadn’t met a single man in London who could entice her away from Colin. “Why won’t you nap?” she sang to him. “Oh, why won’t you nap?”
The door opened and she turned, thinking that it would be Povy, perhaps holding up all his fingers. But it was her papa.
He looked tired but happy, bone happy. Eugenia had the feeling that her darling, adored stepmother must have made the most of the hour since they disappeared after luncheon. Not that she noticed where they were going, of course.
“You never napped either,” her papa remarked, stolling into the room. “You were an awful infant.”
Eugenia snorted. “And how would you know, Lord Strange? Since you spent my childhood racketing around a house full of gorgeous courtesans and mongrelly men?”
“Mongrelly men?” he said. “Here, let me have that baby.” Colin had stuck his head up and was making cooing, gurgling noises at the sound of his father’s voice.
“I was just getting him to sleep,” Eugenia complained, handing him over.
“You look very fine to be in the nursery,” her father said, looking her up and down. “New gown? And not to be indelicate, my daughter, but you are wearing something under it, aren’t you?”
Eugenia turned up her nose. “This is Madame Carême’s very finest new creation, Papa, and I’ll thank you not to insult it. Or ask questions that don’t concern you.” But she smiled down at her gorgeous morning gown. It was made of the finest silk taffeta. It fell straight from her breasts and then frothed into an enchanting little ruffle at the bottom.
“Well, go on then,” her papa said. “All those gentlemen downstairs aren’t here to see me, you know.”
“They might be,” Eugenia said, checking her reflection in the nursery mirror.
Her father snorted.
“They would love to snuggle up to the newest marquis in London,” she said.
But her father wasn’t listening to her. He was humming to Colin, and rocking his arms in a way that Eugenia almost felt she could remember in her bones. She went over to him and put her head on his shoulder. “I love you, Papa.”
“You too, sweetheart,” he said. “You too.”
And then she went out of the door, knowing exactly why she didn’t care about all those gentlemen down in the drawing room. Because not a one of them was a scrap on her papa, that’s why.
She met Harriet coming down the corridor. Her
beloved, sweet-faced stepmother didn’t look nearly as tired as her papa. In fact, she had a sort of glow about her that made Eugenia secretly grin.
“I think Papa is finally getting Colin to sleep,” Eugenia whispered. “I couldn’t quite manage it. I was about to give up and call for his nurse.”
Harriet fluttered her hand toward the drawing room. “There’s twelve of them in there now,” she whispered back.
Eugenia groaned, but turned and sauntered down the stairs.
Harriet smiled, watching her go. Her awkward, big-nosed child had turned into the most ravishing girl to debut on the ton in years. She had all the eligible gentlemen—and most of the ineligible ones—at her knees, if not her feet. Not that Eugenia gave a damn.
Jem looked up from the crib where he was just putting down Colin.
“You’re a miracle,” Harriet said softly. Colin gave a little snore and turned over. She looked down at him. “He’s so beautiful, isn’t he?”
Jem caught her in his arms. “Not as beautiful as you. He takes after his father. I can already see the wrinkles starting by his eyes.”
Lovingly Harriet pushed back the hair from his laughing eyes. Her body still tingled from the pleasure they’d shared and she knew that he still felt it too. “Remember when I first met you? I thought you were the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and since I arrived at your house with Villiers, that was really saying something.”
“My first thought was that if Villiers had any idea of switching sides and seducing you, I’d kill him first. I should have known from that moment. I’ve never given a damn where men find their pleasure, and suddenly I was like a dog with a bone.”
“A very strange bone,” Harriet laughed.
He nuzzled her. “I must say, I am glad that you’ve given up your breeches.”
“It wasn’t hard once I realized that everything I learned in breeches I could simply employ in my gowns.”
“Still, you never sit quietly as ladies are wont to do, during dinner conversation.”
“No,” she said, grinning.
“And you’re the most bruising rider in five counties, although no one knows that the duchess goes forth at twilight scandalously clad in breeches.”
“Let’s not forget the fact that I took you in our last two rapier matches.”
“No more,” he whispered, his hand rounded on her belly. “No more riding and no more rapiers, Harriet.”
“Not for a while.” She couldn’t help smiling.
“Where do you suppose this baby came from?” he said wonderingly.
“The usual places.” He loved her laugh.
“But we were married for years without children. And then Colin, and now—”
“I didn’t think I could.”
Under his hand was just the smallest flutter of life. “I never used to cry, not a single damp eye, before I met you,” he said accusingly.
She kissed him until he didn’t feel sentimental anymore, just hungry. But he didn’t want to wear Harriet out, so he didn’t follow that kiss to its natural conclusion.
“Povy told me that a letter arrived from your sister,” Harriet told him. “I think she is happy in London, don’t you?”
He nodded. “She loves being a matron at Magdalen House…the way she talks about the head of the Metropolitan Police. Do you think, Harriet? Perhaps?”
Harriet grinned. “She’ll be lucky if he doesn’t arrest her. The letter I had last week described two young women whom she stole out of a brothel, as best I could understand.”
“She’s not always prudent about her own safety.”
“She told me she carries a knife in each boot,” Harriet said, running her hand along his cheek. “I expect Eugenia to start carrying weapons any moment. She adores your sister, you know.”
He was silent for a moment. “I couldn’t have imagined our life when I first met you in those breeches.”
Harriet stretched. Her body was ripe with happiness. Pregnancy didn’t make her cantankerous or nauseated. Instead she was singing with happiness. “I ruined you. There you were, happy as a louse in the queen’s mattress, surrounded by concubines and courtesans and actresses…”
“And having nothing to do with any of them.”
“You were waiting for me,” she said. “You know, someone to wear the breeches in the family.” She looked up at him, but he was laughing.
Silently, of course.
A Note About Card Games, Fashionable Vices, and Family Courts
This novel opens with a scene from Judge Truder’s court. Judge Truder does not exist, but the “criminals” prosecuted in his court do. Poor Loveday Billing married only two men (though there are cases that reference as many as seven wives or husbands), but she was acquitted, precisely as described here. The arrangement by which nobility presided in court was unusual but not unheard of (though for a woman to be the “judge” would be highly unlikely). The English countryside was patched with little jurisdictions and shire courts whose procedures did not follow the dictates laid out by the English government, but were molded by local tradition cobbled together with necessity.
At one point, Jem says that every king’s court has a Game such as the one he runs—whether it’s conducted in court itself, or at a country house, or in a tavern. I thought up the Game after reading Samuel Pepys’s wonderful diary. Pepys, who lived from 1633–1703, kept a diary that detailed everything from his fights with his wife over her penchant for “laced” gowns, to his affaires with various women (details written in code), to his various positions in and about the English government. I was fascinated by the casual way by which crucial business was conducted, often over a chance meeting or a game of cards. At one point Pepys describes the King summoning a gentleman to play with him, where the said gentleman lost 50 shillings, but said he was pleased, since the benefit of playing in a high-level card game was worth the loss of 50 shillings. Thus was born Jem’s “Game.”
Pepys lived before the Georgian period—but the mores of his diary, in which gentlemen routinely have mistresses, and ladies take lovers, are true of the Georgian period as well. We might turn to another diary for a glimpse of a Georgian gentleman’s life. James Boswell lived from 1740–1795; by age twenty-nine, he had already detailed the seduction of three wives, four actresses, Rousseau’s lover, three middle-class women, and over sixty street girls.
To be a high-born Englishman in the Georgian period was to live at a time when adultery was a fashionable vice, rather than a crime. And yet…if indelicacy was a fashion, love was another one. It was Lord Byron, a mad, bad, Georgian Englishman, who wrote that “our sweetest memorial [is] the first kiss of love.”
About the Author
Author of fourteen award-winning romances, ELOISA JAMES is a professor of English literature who lives with her family in New Jersey. All her books must have been written in her sleep, because her days are taken up by caring for two children with advanced degrees in whining, a demanding guinea pig, a smelly frog, and a tumbledown house. Letters from readers provide a great escape! Write Eloisa at
[email protected] or visit her website at www.eloisajames.com.
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By Eloisa James
DUCHESS BY NIGHT
AN AFFAIR BEFORE CHRISTMAS
DESPERATE DUCHESSES
PLEASURE FOR PLEASURE
THE TAMING OF THE DUKE
KISS ME, ANNABEL
MUCH ADO ABOUT YOU
YOUR WICKED WAYS
A WILD PURSUIT
FOOL FOR LOVE
DUCHESS IN LOVE
Coming Soon
WHEN THE DUKE RETURNS
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DUCHESS BY NIGHT. Copyright © 2008 by Eloisa James. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Microsoft Reader May 2008 ISBN 978-0-06-169062-4
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