The Ugly Duchess

  “You don’t love me in the least,” James said, breaching the unspoken rule that English gentlemen never discussed such matters. “Do you?”

  “Of all the asinine questions, that has to be the most,” the duke said, color exploding into his cheeks. “You’re my heir, and that’s the end of it.”

  “People who love each other don’t do this sort of thing,” James said dully. He walked over to the library door, opened it, and stood beside it. “Go.”

  “You’ll have to talk to her,” the duke said, not moving. “Take charge of the situation. You’re the man here. Assert yourself. Don’t let her go into hysterics; it might set a pattern.”

  “Go,” James repeated, not trusting himself to say anything else.

  The duke huffed, but he walked toward the door. He stopped with his hand on the knob, but didn’t turn around. “I love you,” he said, quietly for him. “I—I love you.” And then he left.

  Staring at the closed door, James was struck by another blinding wave of longing for his mother—for the days when his mother, or at least his nanny, could make anything better. He had to go into the morning room. He had to talk to Daisy, tell her how much he—how much what? She would never believe he loved her.

  He’d just said it to his father: People who loved each other didn’t do cruel things to each other.

  The leaden feeling in his chest spread through his body. Maybe he was incapable of loving anyone. He was like his father. He should just leave. She’d be better off without him.

  He made his way to the morning room door.

  For a long time Theo didn’t move, her muscles frozen, her eyes shut. The bitterness in her stomach threatened to rise into her throat.

  Fighting for control, she didn’t even notice at first when a pair of boots moved directly into her line of vision.

  Standing up and meeting her husband’s eyes took every bit of backbone Theodora Ryburn had. But stand she did, and she met his eyes, too. And she saw exactly what she expected: shame. That answered her last, lingering question. He had never wanted to marry her.

  So she steeled herself. “I hope you enjoyed that,” she said finally. “As I’m sure you have guessed, it’s the very last time your wife will service you.”

  “Daisy.”

  “Must I spell it out?”

  “Don’t leave me,” he said, choking out the words.

  Theo had retreated behind a thick ice wall, where she felt utterly calm. And her brain was working with remarkable adroitness.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “I’m not leaving you; I’m throwing you out. I’ll mend the estate with whatever is left of my embezzled dowry. I think we can both agree, after your behavior at yesterday’s meeting, that you would be utterly unhelpful and won’t be missed.”

  He swallowed, a faint sign of mortification that she welcomed.

  “That being the case, there’s nothing to keep you here,” she observed. “You and your father are obviously not on the best of terms. He’s a vulgar, despicable criminal, and you are a weak-kneed fool—who deliberately ruined my life in order to cover up your father’s crimes.”

  His eyes were burning, but still he was silent.

  “You will leave this house, and then you will leave England altogether. You may have that boat you visited yesterday—take it somewhere. I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

  James shifted from foot to foot, for all the world like a guilty child.

  “The damnable part is that the marriage was consummated,” she continued. “There’s no getting out of it.”

  “I don’t want to get out of it.” James’s words came out in a strangled growl.

  “I expect you don’t. After all, there I was, kneeling at your feet, begging for favors you might toss my way. As your father so kindly pointed out, any man would be in seventh heaven; I gather such eagerness is generally paid for. I suppose you were reiterating the sort of demands you give a doxy when ordering me to not wear drawers? And to wear my hair down?”

  “No!”

  “Don’t bellow at me,” Theo responded. “I’m not a terrified scullery maid facing your father. If you throw a china shepherdess at me, I’ll pick up the bloody dining room table and throw it at your head.”

  “I have never thrown anything,” James stated.

  “You’re just coming into your own. I’m sure when you’re as old as your father you’ll have equal bragging rights to being a bastard. Or . . . wait. I think you’ve already earned them.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’m just so sorry, Daisy.”

  His face was contorted, as if he was trying not to cry, but she didn’t feel a bit of pity. Safe behind her icy wall, she felt nothing.

  “You’re beautiful, and I’m not. But you know something, James? I’d rather be me a hundred times over. Because when I fell in love with you, I did it honestly. I was a fool; I realize that now. But I loved you last night. I truly loved you. I hope you enjoyed it, because I think I’m probably the last person stupid enough, and fooled enough by your beautiful face, to think that there’s anything worthwhile inside you.”

  His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

  She had one more thing to say. “When someone falls in love with me—and he will, because life is long, and this marriage is over—he’ll love me for who I am, not for my face. He’ll be able to see inside me, and he’ll want me for more than my dowry, or the fact that I could be ordered about and turned into a prostitute without even understanding my own humiliation.”

  “I didn’t do that!”

  She managed to keep her voice steady. “You are disgusting. Utterly disgusting. But the saddest part of this is that I did all that with you because I thought I was in love with you, and that you loved me as well. I didn’t do it for money, which is why you did it. So I think your father had it wrong: it seems that I just had two very expensive nights with a cicisbeo.”

  “Don’t do this,” he said, his voice little more than a rough whisper. “Please, Daisy, don’t. Don’t do this.”

  “Do what? Tell you the truth?”

  “Break us apart.”

  She waited, but he found no more words.

  “There is no us,” she said, feeling suddenly shattered. “I’ll expect you to leave the house within the day.” To her horror, she realized that the sight of him still warmed some errant part of her heart, and the very realization drove her on.

  “I would never have done this to you.” For the first time, her voice almost cracked. “I loved you, James. I really loved you. The odd thing is that I didn’t even realize it until we were married. But even if I hadn’t loved you that way, I wouldn’t have betrayed you, because you were my closest friend. My brother. You could have just asked me, you know.”

  His face had turned deathly white. “Asked you what?”

  “Asked me for my money,” she said, head high, eyes dry. “People who love . . . they share. They give. I would have given you that money. You needn’t have walked over me to get to it.”

  She turned and left, closing the door precisely behind her.

  She climbed the stairs to the second floor feeling as if she were a hundred years old, as empty and wizened as a beldame. As she walked down the corridor, the duke emerged from his chamber.

  She met his eyes without even a tinge of shame. She was not the one to be ashamed.

  His eyes fell.

  “I own this house,” she told the top of his head. “I want you out of it. As I learned yesterday, I seem to have promised you a generous allowance. You can rent your own damned house with it.”

  His head jerked up and he bellowed, “You can’t do that!”

  “If you are not out of here by tomorrow, I will take that lying estate manager, Reede, and deliver him and his records directly to my solicitors, not to mention to Bow Street. Say what you like. Tell your friends that you can’t bear to see my ugly face in the morning. But move out.”

  “Tell her she can’t do that!”
her father-in-law shouted.

  She glanced down and saw James standing at the bottom of the stairs, his hand clenched on the banister. “He’s leaving, too,” she told the duke. “I’m closing this house to save the expense of running it. I’ll be living in Staffordshire for the foreseeable future, but if either of you wishes to communicate with me, you can do it through my solicitor.”

  “I will not communicate with my wife through a solicitor,” James said from below.

  “I agree. I would prefer that you not communicate at all.”

  “You’re a virago,” the duke snarled, his voice shaking with rage.

  “There’s nothing to throw in this hallway,” she said, looking at him with distaste.

  “You cannot make me leave my own house, the house my grandfather built.”

  “No, I can’t. But I can air the evidence of your embezzlement of my dowry, left in your care by your best friend. Interesting, that.” She glanced back down at James. “Best friends seem to be no more than fodder for betrayal in this family.”

  The scorn in her words seemed finally to penetrate the duke. He wheeled and stalked back to his chamber without another word.

  Theo did not look down the stairs to see if James was still there. She knew he was staring up at her; she could feel his eyes on her back.

  But she walked on, leaving Daisy behind. Leaving her marriage behind.

  Leaving her heart behind.

  Part Two

  After

  Fourteen

  Nine months later

  Aboard the Percival

  Somewhere in the Maldives

  “We can’t outrun it, my lord. We’re too heavy.” The quartermaster, a stout man named Squib, had to shout at James to be heard. Wind stripped the fear from his voice, but not from his face.

  “Hold the wheel.” James turned around, scanning the horizon. The approaching ship was barely visible, but she was skimming the waves as if she had taken wing. “You’re sure she’s a pirate vessel?”

  “Lookout confirmed it,” Squib said, blotting his forehead. “I’ve managed to avoid pirates all these years, dammit, and I have new grandbabies at home. I should have just stayed in London.”

  “Is she flying a black flag?”

  Squib nodded. “We’re done for. It’s the Flying Poppy.” He gave an involuntary moan. “Got a red flower on black; easy to spot.”

  James had been standing at the rail, rigid, staring at the ship as if his hard stare could make it disappear. The moment he heard the name, relief made his shoulders slump. He knew about this ship, and if he was right, they had a chance. A slender chance, but it was better than nothing. “Could be worse,” he said, hoping he was right.

  “The Poppy has taken five ships this season alone, from what I heard at the last port. The only thing can be said is that they don’t generally kill the crew, but they sink the vessels. We’re done for, my lord.”

  James grunted. “Are the cannon ready to fire?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re not done for until the last moment. Steer ahead. Doesn’t really matter where you go.”

  James leapt down from the forecastle and ran below decks. His crew was busy with the cannons, slamming the huge sticks that tamped the powder into place. They didn’t pause until he addressed them.

  “Men!”

  They all looked up. An hour earlier, they had had the sun-bronzed lethargy of men on a long voyage, tired of salt beef, tired of flying fish, their eyes and noses full of salt. But now, to a man, they were terrified.

  “Our goal is to stay alive,” James told them.

  There was a moment of surprised silence.

  “We’ll give the cannon a try. We might get lucky and hit her broadside. But those pirates want what’s in our hold. And I don’t want all of you killed fighting hand-to-hand with men who have spent their lives doing it. If we don’t sink the ship on the first go, I want you all on the deck. Face down.”

  At that, there was a babble of angry voices.

  “I’ve never turned down a fight in me life,” Clamper shouted. He hailed from Cheapside, and had a rugged face and a handy way with a dagger.

  “You will now,” James said. “You pull that blade of yours, Clamper, and I’ll consider you mutinous.”

  Silence again. He and the crew had been together nine months. There had been difficult moments as he learned the ways of the sea and sailing a trading vessel, but Squib had stood at his shoulder the entire time. And he’d be damned if he’d let his crew be massacred. “I intend to challenge the captain,” he said. “To invoke sea law.”

  “Pirates don’t have no sea law,” someone shouted.

  “The captain of the Flying Poppy does,” James said. He’d made it his business to find out whatever he could about the pirates known to operate between India and the British Isles. “His name is Sir Griffin Barry; he’s a baronet and a distant relative. We met when we were both boys. He’ll remember me.”

  “So you can talk to him in yez language,” Clamper said, a flicker of hope dawning in his eyes.

  “I can try,” James said. Barry was an unregenerate criminal, of course. But he had gone to Eton. And they were third cousins. In short, there were other degenerates in his family besides his father and himself. “Don’t fire those cannon until I give the word.”

  But in the end, the word never came. The crew of the Flying Poppy was far too canny to expose her side to a vessel they were bent on plundering, and the Percival was too heavy in the water, thanks to its full load of spice, to move nimbly. The Poppy danced around her until the pirates pulled up alongside and boarded without incident.

  Men flowed over the railing in a rush. Upon seeing the Percival’s crew lying face down on their own deck, they spread out along the railing without a word, backs to the sea, pistols in one hand, knives in the other. Apparently the Percival was not the first ship whose captain had surrendered at the sight of that bloodred poppy sewn onto a field of black.

  The captain was the last to board, landing on the deck with a knife between his teeth and a pistol in his right hand. He certainly didn’t look like a scion of gentle English stock; he was dressed like a dockworker. A small poppy, matching the one on his flag, was tattooed below his right eye.

  “Sir Griffin Barry,” James said, inclining his chin precisely the degree required by an earl greeting a baronet. He stood in the midst of his prostrate men, all of them surrounded by a loose ring of pirates. He was dressed, weirdly but calculatedly, in court attire: a coat embroidered in gold thread with buttons made of gold twist. He even wore a wig—rather hastily plopped on top of his head, to be sure, but it was there.

  Barry took a lightning look at this vision, then leaned back against the railing and burst into laughter. It was not a benevolent laughter, by any means, but at least he was laughing.

  James felt a pulse of courage at not being shot on sight. “Under sea law, I could challenge you to a duel,” he remarked, his tone as casually fearless as he could muster.

  The baronet’s eyes narrowed, and his hand tightened on his pistol. “You could.”

  “Or we could simply retire to my cabin and have a drink. After all, we haven’t seen each other in—what?—five years?”

  His entire crew could be dead in a matter of three minutes, by his estimate. But James was gambling on the ancient system of British courtesy, drilled into the head of every aristocratic boy from the time they could toddle. He added, deliberately, “I believe our late Aunt Agatha would prefer the latter.”

  “Bloody hell,” Barry said, his eyes widening with dawning recognition. “Thought you were any fool aristocrat. But you’re the Dam’Fool Duke’s son.”

  James bowed, flourishing the pristine lace at his wrists. “Islay. James Ryburn at your service. Something of a pleasure to meet you again, Sir Griffin Barth—”

  Barry cut off the utterance of his second name with an obscenity. James felt a prick of satisfaction, along with another wave of courage. Who knew one could inti
midate a pirate captain with private information such as the fact his middle name was Bartholomew?

  “What in bloody hell are you doing out here, other than waiting to be marauded by me?” Barry growled. But the balance of power had shifted. James’s status as heir to a dukedom had leveled the playing field, for all Barry was both a pirate and a baronet.

  “Making my fortune after my father lost one and embezzled another. Surely you, Coz, could be the one to teach me to do that? The Poppy Two, perhaps?” Holding his cousin’s eyes, he threw off the embroidered coat, revealing the coarse shirt underneath. With another quick gesture, his wig spun through the air and overboard.

  “I’ve been captain of this vessel for nine months. I’ve learned the wind and the water and the stars. I have a hold full of spice, but I’d like to do something new. You might say, Coz, that the criminal instinct runs in our family.”

  Whatever Barry had expected to hear, it wasn’t that. James held his breath. He didn’t let his eyes drift downward toward his men, lest it be taken as a sign of concern and therefore of weakness.

  “I’ll have that brandy,” Barry said, finally.

  “My men are unarmed,” James remarked, as if he were commenting on the weather.

  Barry jerked his head toward one of his men. “Round them up and put them over there by the rail while I talk to his lordship here.” He looked back at James, the cold ruthlessness of a pirate captain in his eyes. “If I don’t come above deck in an hour, kill them all, Sly. Kill them all.”

  An hour passed, and Barry did not reappear. Sly, however, knew better than to carry out his captain’s orders before taking a peek downstairs. By the time he took a look, James and Griffin were well into their second bottle of cognac.