Duchess by Night

  He put on his hat and marched out of the court. She wasn’t a real judge, of course. But she was what they’d got in Berrow, and it was better than nothing.

  Everyone nodded to him on the way out.

  Chapter Seven

  In Which Strange Guests Arrive at Lord Strange’s House

  February 5, 1784

  Fonthill

  Lord Strange’s Country Estate

  Lord Strange never managed to quite ignore his butler, although he frequently tried. Povy felt the need to make announcements three or four times a day, and although Jem had frequently pointed out that he had no interest in household matters, the butler persisted in informing him.

  So Jem didn’t look up when he heard Povy’s tread in the hallway, and merely reminded himself to install a latch on the inside of the door as the butler came to a halt before his desk.

  “Visitors have arrived, my lord. Perhaps you might wish to greet them.”

  “I’ll greet them this evening, as usual.” He’d woken up in the middle of the night with two ideas simultaneously: one for a bridge suspension system, and the other for a madrigal. He had the bridge drawn in charcoal, and the madrigal in four parts and on the whole, the madrigal was the success. The bridge looked very pretty, but he rather thought the weight-bearing beams might be overburdened. Perhaps if he lowered the arch itself…

  “The Duke of Villiers has arrived,” Povy announced.

  “He likes the velvet suite, doesn’t he? Relishes all that frivolous splendor. Tell him I’ll see him at supper.”

  “He is accompanied by the Duchess of Cosway.”

  Jem looked up. “Who the hell is that?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, the Duchess of Cosway is some sixty years of age and lives a retired life in Colchester.”

  “Oh dear,” Jem said, grinning. “I gather that Villiers’s companion is not an antique countrywoman?”

  Povy coughed. “It is remotely possible that the young woman in question is the wife of the current Duke of Cosway, son of the aforementioned duchess. I understand that he contracted marriage at a very early age, but since he left the country thereafter, Debrett’s does not credit the marriage as having reached full sovereignty.”

  “Not consummated, in other words,” Jem said, tracing the line under the bridge again.

  “Precisely.”

  “Do you or don’t you think this young woman is the bride-to-be?”

  “It is possible.”

  “But equally possible that Villiers has brought a fancy piece with him, gusseted up like a Christmas lamb. I will greet the supposed duchess at supper as well, Povy. Put Villiers and the young woman in adjoining rooms.”

  “Yes, your lordship. They are accompanied by a young man whom the duke introduced as a relative, Mr. Cope.”

  “Never heard of him either.”

  “He is quite young,” Povy said. It was evident in his tone that Povy considered the young man too young for the exuberant nature of a Strange house party.

  “That’s not our problem, Povy. Has my new secretary, Miss DesJardins, settled in yet?”

  “The young Frenchwoman seems quite comfortable, my lord. She is planning an entertainment for tomorrow. Something called a Tahitian Feast of Venus.”

  Jem started smiling. “I knew she would liven up our entertainments. They’ve been deadly dull lately. Tahitian as in the country of Tahiti?”

  “My sense would be that there is little connection, except perhaps that the land of Tahiti is a very warm country, which encourages lack of clothing,” Povy said repressively. “Miss DesJardins has requested that the fires in the South Ballroom be lit to their highest capacity and kept there.” He cleared his throat. “You might want to encourage the Duke of Villiers to confine his relative to his quarters tomorrow. Miss DesJardins is talking of twelve virgins.”

  “Twelve?” Jem said, barking with laughter again. “She must be trafficking in miracles. There isn’t one in the house!”

  “Mr. Cope…” Povy began.

  Jem narrowed his eyes.

  “The lad has a remarkably innocent face.”

  “Innocence is a time of life, not an irrevocable blot.”

  But Povy had known his master for many years, and he gave him a stern look. “Mr. Cope is not prepared for the Feast of Venus.”

  Jem got up with a sigh. “I suppose I’ll come down. I might as well assess this child for myself. What a fool Villiers is, to bring an innocent to my house. Povy, you do remember Wilkinson, don’t you? He had an innocent face, but my word!”

  “A very different kind of look in Wilkinson’s face,” Povy said.

  Jem hated to leave his work, but he paid Povy a prince’s ransom just to know this sort of thing. His house sometimes shook from sins collected under its roof, but the one thing he could not and would not tolerate was the defilement of innocence. No young woman played a Tahitian virgin in his house unless she did it for pleasure. And no Mr. Cope was going to lose his wide-eyed purity unless he wished to.

  Though honestly, he couldn’t remember the last young man whom he thought needed shielding. Villiers’s young relative was probably straining at the leash.

  “Wasn’t there a time of life when you would have lusted to see a feast of Tahitian virgins, Povy?” he asked, leaving the room.

  “No,” Povy said repressively.

  That seemed to answer that, so Jem continued down the stairs.

  Fifteen minutes later he entered the small Rose Salon without being announced, paused for a moment to survey his visitors, and then swore under his breath. Povy was an intelligent, canny miracle and he should never have doubted him.

  There was only one word for Mr. Cope: adorable. He had curly brown hair, pulled into a simple pigtail at his neck, with just a dusting of powder. He wore a beautiful coat; he could hardly be Villiers’s relative without exhibiting a fine sense of style. But his eyes gave him away. They were exquisite, and not just because of their color and a fringe of lash that could have graced a princess. They were—fresh.

  Jem shot Villiers a look through narrowed eyes. There was something peculiar about this. For one thing, Villiers wasn’t sleeping with the woman he’d dragged along with him, the supposed Duchess of Cosway, the duchess who didn’t exist. She was a pretty piece, all right, as glittering and sultry as a peacock, but Villiers was talking to her without the faintest desire in his eye.

  On the other hand, Jem wasn’t sure that Villiers could feel desire for anyone, not if he were as ill as he looked. The man had to have lost three stone.

  Mr. Cope was standing close to Villiers, with his eyes as round as saucers, staring at a statue Jem had shipped from Crete on an impulse. That kiss between Mars and Venus was on the risqué side. Of course, they were married (mythologically speaking). But the whole question of marital virtue was somewhat offset by the fact that Mars was wearing a helmet—but nothing else.

  “Villiers,” Jem said, walking forward.

  The duke turned around and swept him a bow. Even gaunt as Villiers was, he looked every inch of duke.

  “We’d better get you in bed,” Jem said by way of greeting. He’d heard Villiers was ill, but hadn’t realized how close he came to death. It gave him a queer feeling, so Jem said roughly, “You look like hell.”

  “I’m better than I was. But I’m not supposed to play chess, so I’m relying on you and your dubious charms to entertain me, Strange.”

  “You’ll have to entertain yourself,” Jem said, turning to the so-called duchess and bowing. “Good morning, Your Grace.”

  Instantly he saw that she was a duchess. A rather gaudy one, in an Italian style, but he knew instantly that he was looking at the Duchess of Cosway. Or perhaps the future Duchess of Cosway was the proper terminology.

  It was a miracle that she managed to curtsy, given that her traveling dress appeared to have been sewed onto her body.

  “You do me too much honor,” Jem said with patent insincerity. This was not the sort of guest he enjoyed.
He disliked the way that titles, especially the higher-up ones, seemed to give their holders the right to behave like despicable fools. She would be fussy, and shocked, and likely stamp out in high dudgeon in a day or so.

  But then she smiled at him, a lush armful of warm Italian skin and sweet ruby mouth, and he changed his mind. There was something wicked about that mouth, a hint of a kiss or a kiss-to-be-taken hanging in the corner.

  She may be a virgin, but she didn’t look shockable.

  Mr. Cope, on the other hand, was so new-fledged that he bobbed his bow like a schoolboy.

  Jem was rarely shocked by life, but he was conscious of a little surprise now. In the course of throwing his house open to anyone he (and Povy) deemed interesting, he had seen all sorts of desire. Very little of it interested him—and none of it surprised him.

  But he was surprised now. Surprised by a little surge of interest in himself—shamefully—for Mr. Cope. For a stripling with big eyes and not even a sign of a beard. For a male. For God’s sake, Jem thought with disgust. If this is getting old, I want nothing to do with it.

  And he made a mental note to stay far away from Cope.

  “Just how old is that youth you’ve brought along?” he managed to ask Villiers sotto voce, a few moments later.

  “Twenty-two,” Villiers said. “I know he looks like a cherub, but don’t be fooled, Strange.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a hardened reprobate. Plays the innocent because it pulls the ladies. Wait til you see him with them. They fall over him screaming. Fall backwards, really. He’s a nice lad, though, and doesn’t take advantage.”

  “Try another one,” Jem said, his voice hardening. “This house may be a byword, Villiers, but I’ll thank you to pack him up and send him home to his mother.”

  Villiers’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but Jem had never backed down to any duke’s desires, and he wouldn’t now. Especially to one of the few men in England whom he thought of as being of his own weight intellectually.

  “I dislike the idea that my house is being treated as some sort of proving ground for innocents.”

  There was a thread of anger—and an odd strain of amusement—in Villiers’s voice. “All right, he’s not a rakehell. Far from it. But he is twenty-two. And he’s got as much right as anyone else to a full life. Surely you’d be the first to say that?”

  “What do you mean? What’s his life been up til now?”

  “His mother is eccentric,” Villiers said. “She lives in the country and has kept him close by her side.”

  Jem glanced over at Cope. He was standing with the duchess as they examined the intertwined bodies of Venus and Mars. The marble cleverly blended into one piece during the crucial encounter. The corner of his mouth quirked as he saw Mr. Cope point to the relevant spot.

  Villiers followed his gaze. “He’s a willing learner.”

  “Did you rescue him?”

  “Something of the sort. I promised him a look at life that wouldn’t hurt him. He’s twenty-two, and—I hardly need to say it—a virgin. I could have taken him to a brothel in London, but I didn’t want that dewy look of his dashed when he had to hand over coins to the lass of his choice.”

  Jem didn’t like the reasoning. Yet he couldn’t deny but that it made sense. If he had a son, he wouldn’t want him in a brothel either.

  “The same diseases are to be found here as elsewhere,” he said, a warning in his voice.

  “Then I’ll trust you to steer him the right direction, Strange.” Villiers made a sour face. “The trip took more out of me than I expected. My Scottish devil of a doctor told me not to travel, but I overruled him. And now I think he was likely right.”

  Villiers’s face was a pallid white, with deep bruises under his eyes. Jem jerked his head at Povy. “You’ll stay in bed,” he said, “and I’ll watch over your fledgling. And what of that duchess? Or should I say, half-duchess? Am I to watch over her as well?”

  Villiers gave him a faint smile. “You might want to warn your guests she’s in the house.”

  “A wild one?”

  “Jemma had a Twelfth Night party—do you know the Duchess of Beaumont?”

  “I met her once. Dared her to come visit, but she didn’t have the backbone.”

  “Or perhaps the desire,” Villiers said mildly. “Not everyone thinks that an invitation to your house is a ticket to Paradise, you know.”

  “I’m glad you succumbed.” And he meant it.

  “The duchess had all the married men at Jemma’s party running in little circles around her. It was like a trained dog act.”

  Jem snorted. “You weren’t one of them?”

  “Not in the cards at the moment,” Villiers said. “I didn’t even make it to the ballroom, just languished in a side room waiting for visitors.”

  There was a note of self-mockery in his voice. He didn’t want sympathy. “You deserved every moment, playing the fool with a rapier. We’re too old for that.”

  “I’m not allowed to play chess,” Villiers said, sounding as if he were announcing a ritual castration.

  “Says who?”

  “Dr. Treglown, the Scottish devil who saved my life. I was in and out of a fever for months, and apparently I did a lot of raving about chess. He says I have to take a break and rest my brain.”

  “Ah, so a visit to the house of tarnished angels is a perfect convalescence. Though I still don’t quite understand why you dragged along those two, I’ll take care of them for you.”

  “Put them in adjoining chambers,” Villiers said.

  “What?”

  Villiers looked at him. “I thought it was impossible to shock you,” he observed. “I’m off to bed, if you please.”

  Povy ushered him away and Jem stood for a moment, staring at the odd couple still looking at the statue. They were no longer examining the salacious point at which female marble blended into male. Instead, Mr. Cope was running his finger down the arch of Venus’s neck.

  It was one of Jem’s favorite aspects of the statue. Venus had her head thrown back, her face a mixture of desire, joy, and despair. The genius who sculpted it had captured, to Jem’s mind, the joy—and the grief—of marriage. Venus’s head fell back, her body ravished by a pleasure she couldn’t control and somewhat resented.

  Jem wrenched his eyes away from Mr. Cope’s slender finger. Really, it was time he took a mistress again.

  He really meant it: If this oddness was part of growing old, he wanted nothing to do with it.

  Chapter Eight

  The Definition of Marital Success

  The same day

  Before dinner

  Harriet couldn’t stop giggling, once she was alone in her bedchamber. She’d done it! She’d really done it! She had bowed to Lord Strange, and murmured something in as gruff a voice as she could manage, and he had believed her to be male. She didn’t see even a flicker of disbelief in his eyes.

  The first moment she saw him, she thought the jig was up. She always considered Villiers rather terrifyingly intelligent, with his heavy-lidded eyes and sardonic comments.

  But Villiers was nothing compared to Strange. Strange had a lean face that had seen use, but the sardonic lines by his mouth only emphasized the beauty of his bones, the banked sensuality of his eyes, the long body that reminded her of the coiled energy of a greyhound. Put together with the fierce intelligence in his eyes, and the charm…God, he had charm.

  But it was his intelligence that made him frightening. No wonder Villiers had called him a genius. He looked like one. And yet—he hadn’t seen through her disguise!

  She dropped to the bed, and froze for a moment before she realized that the odd feeling in her legs was due to her breeches.

  She lay back and swung her legs into the air. It was utterly bizarre to see her legs in the open like this. She never looked at herself in a glass unless she was wearing a corset, camisole, panniers, petticoats, and a gown on top. Somewhere under there were her legs, one had to suppose. r />
  But now, wearing this ridiculous male attire, they were exposed. Thanks to Villiers, who had ordered her an array of clothing fit for a young prince, her breeches were closely shaped to her leg, ending at the knee. They buttoned on the outside, and had a closure in the front that made her laugh. Even her knees were entirely visible, clad in pale, violet-colored stockings.

  Actually, her legs looked shapely and strong. The truth was that while Harriet always felt smothered in women’s clothing, she was starting to think that she looked just right in breeches. Her body was a kind built for endurance, with muscles in her legs that came from the way she walked for miles after breakfast.

  Benjamin never liked that habit. He preferred to see her reclining on a couch, waiting to hear about his latest chess match. Not strolling over to see how the sow was faring with her new piglets. “That’s not duchess’s work,” he would tell her. But then he would laugh. Benjamin was a great laugher. He never truly hated her penchant for walking. Nor her legs.

  Though come to think of it, her husband had likely never seen her legs this clearly.

  The adjoining door opened and Harriet sat up so fast that her head spun.

  “It’s just me,” Isidore said. “I’m sorry; I should have knocked.”

  “Do come in,” Harriet said, lying back again. “I’m admiring my breeches.”

  “They are lovely,” Isidore said, wandering into the room. “But if I were playing the man I would want oval-shaped knee buckles. Oh—and perhaps knee ribbands.”

  Harriet wrinkled her nose. “Too feminine. I have to look as masculine as possible.”

  ‘The odd thing is, Harriet, that you do look masculine. I mean that you look perfectly feminine and delectable in a gown, but there’s something, oh, out-doors-ish about you at the moment. I really wouldn’t guess that you were a woman in a man’s costume. I wonder if I could get away with it.”

  “No. Your features are far too delicate.”

  “So are yours,” Isidore persisted. “You have a little pointed chin, and those big eyes. How on earth did you get your brows to look so dark?”