Desperate Duchesses (8 page)

“I’m sure,” Jemma said, gurgling with laughter. “What did he do?”

Harriet took a deep breath. “I’m going to tel you exactly what he said.”

“I’m ready.”

“He said that he had always pitied Benjamin for his miserable chess-playing, but from now on he would try to be nicer to him.”

“Nasty!” Jemma said looking impressed.

“And then he said that there was nothing worse than a lady whore. And that I had tried to get him to screw one of his best friends, and he must be drunk, because he’d forgotten how damn boring women like me were. And final y he said that if I told Benjamin he would kil me.”

The laughter had died on Jemma’s face. “That bastard!”

“And then he put me out on the street. In the middle of Whitefriars Lane and I didn’t have even a ha’penny. I had to walk al the way home.”

“Double bastard!”

“I never told Benjamin. I left for the country the next day because I was such a coward that I couldn’t face him. I felt so guilty and so—so dirty! But then someone wrote me and said they had announced in Parsloe’s—”

“What’s that?”

“The London Chess Club meets at Parsloe’s. They only take one hundred members, and it’s frightful y exclusive. At any rate, a week or so afterwards they announced that Vil iers would be playing Benjamin, in public and for stakes, at White’s. So I knew why Vil iers did it. Because of me.”

“Perhaps…”

“I can’t imagine why I flirted with him,” Harriet said. “You’d think I would have had enough of men who prefer to caress pieces of ivory rather than me. It was so paltry of me. And how—how terribly wrong it al went.”

“Life can be like that,” Jemma said quietly.

“And now,” Harriet said, hearing the rank desperation in her own voice, “I just want Vil iers humiliated somehow. It’s al I can think of. I have to make it right for Benjamin. I have to clear my slate. I
have
to, Jemma!”

Jemma reached out and took her hand. “Benjamin is gone, Harriet. There’s no slate.”

“
Please
.”

Jemma sat stil for a moment. Then: “I wouldn’t do this because of the chess match. I can understand Benjamin’s mortification at losing that match. I could never take my life, but I can understand the horror of losing. Benjamin’s reaction wouldn’t be Vil iers’s fault. Truly, Harriet. It’s the chess.”

“I hate chess.” She said it flatly, but with utter conviction.

“I’l do it because he was an utter bastard to leave you in the road, and to say those things, Harriet.
No one
says something like that to a friend of mine and gets away with it scot-free. The only problem is that I shal have to be rather subtle.”

“Why? I would prefer that he be shamed in front of al London.”

“Because,” Jemma said, “I told you that Roberta is desperately in love with Vil iers. She’s determined to marry him, and I promised I would help her.”

“How on earth are you going to humiliate him at the same time as you push him into marriage?” Harriet began to wring her hands.

But Jemma was grinning again. “The two things are by no means mutual y exclusive, you know. And I love a chal enge.

The first thing I’l do is invite him to my bal .”

“He and Beaumont never speak; he won’t come.”

“He wil ,” Jemma said. “Leave that to me. Now, are you coming?”

Harriet gulped. “Would you mind very much if I didn’t, Jemma? I can’t tel you how horrible it has been since Benjamin died. Everyone looks at me with sympathy except for people who believe I drove him to it. Lady Lacock always tel s me that Benjamin was a cheerful baby, until I feel as if I could scream.”

“We have to solve that too,” Jemma said.

“My life? Some other night,” Harriet said.

“Of course. But you must come for a council of war tomorrow morning.”

“Please, Jemma…may I decline? I promised I would return to the country as soon as possible.”

“Who did you promise? You should be here for the season, Harriet, thinking about marrying again. You can’t stay a dour widow forever.”

“I know,” Harriet said, and then, desperate to change the subject, “I stil don’t think you’l be able to get Vil iers to enter this house.”

Jemma just smiled.

R
oberta would be the first to admit that life with her father had not been designed to turn a young lady into a leader in fashion. It wasn’t that her father had no money; she rather suspected that he had quite a lot. But his priorities were directed in precisely the opposite direction than everything about which Roberta dreamed: London, bal s, love, marriage…

“But Papa,” she would argue with him at supper, “you don’t wish me to live with you my whole life, do you?”

“I would love that!” he would say, beaming at her. “Who else wil catalog my poetry, if not you, my dear? And your criticism, though occasional y harsh, has done much to improve my art. Much! Much! The future wil preserve a warm place for you as the muse of the Marquess of Wharton and Malmesbury.”

“Papa,” she would say (for variations on this theme had recurred for years), “I don’t want to appear in history books as your muse, and I dislike cataloging poetry.” Sometimes she would add that she didn’t like critiquing poetry, either, but that depended on how recently she had torn apart one of his new poems.

At this, the marquess’s face would fal into tragic lines, and he would begin to mutter about the serpent’s tooth that was his only child. And if she begged a new gown, he never said no, but he would only pay for Mrs. Parthnel in the vil age. “If we don’t employ her, child, who wil ?” One of Mrs. Parthnel ’s peculiarities was that she refused to line a sleeve in anything but white cotton duck, and due to sewing problems she routinely encountered, the white general y showed.

Even so, the faces of Jemma’s French maids were almost comical in their dismay when they beheld Roberta. Her gown had once been styled
à la française,
but Mrs. Parthnel had cut out the floating back pleats and used tapes to draw up the sides around into a clumsy polonaise instead. When Roberta objected to the way the waist bunched as it encountered the new bustle, Mrs. Parthnel cut out the bodice and replaced it with one of melon-colored cotton.

Apparently, Roberta’s sense that melon-colored cotton and burgundy silk were not a perfect match was correct, if the rather piercing screams of the French seamstresses could be taken as evidence.

Two seconds later she was stripped to her chemise and Mrs. Parthnel ’s gown was thrown in the corner. “For the beggars,” Jemma’s
femme de chambre,
Brigitte, had explained. “None of us could wear such a thing.”

There was a cheerful little chorus of French agreements from Jemma’s other two maids. Formal gown after gown was brought out, discussed at length, and ceremoniously carried back to Jemma’s dressing room, which Roberta could only imagine as crammed with satins and silks.

Brigitte had explicit directions from the duchess herself. “She must look like a young lady of the utmost innocence,” she dictated. After a half hour or so of gowns trundling from the dressing room to Roberta’s chamber, it became clear that very few of Jemma’s gowns were designed to achieve an innocent air.

The few that were tried on Roberta quickly lost their claims to innocence, though Roberta thought they were exquisite.

Even catching a glimpse of herself wearing one of Jemma’s dazzling French gowns made her heart sing. She didn’t look like a drab country mouse anymore: she looked
beautiful
. Visions of the Duke of Vil iers on his knees spun dizzyingly through her mind.

“You are too generous in the front,” Brigitte stated, dispel ing that dream.

Roberta peered down at her chest. She had nothing compared to the naked centerpiece, after al .

“Is excel ent!” Brigitte said hurriedly. “The men, they are most fond of bosoms. Many bosoms!”

Since Brigitte likely didn’t mean that men preferred women with more than two breasts, Roberta took this as a compliment. Unfortunately, her “many bosoms” made many of Jemma’s gowns unacceptable. She overflowed the bodices in a fashion that Brigitte kept declaring
sensuelle,
rather than
innocente
.

Suddenly Brigitte clapped her hands. “The white silk moiré!” she announced.

There was a little flurry of conversation. One maid ventured the fact that Jemma had labeled the gown
ennuyeuse
.

“Boring,” Brigitte announced, “is just what is needed.”

“Oh, but—” Roberta said unhappily. This was ignored, as had been every other comment she ventured to make.

It certainly was a lovely dress, embroidered with tiny sprays of flowers that looked as if they’d been scattered by the wind.

It showed rather less of her breasts than the others, because the neckline was a V, and trimmed with a smal ruffle of white lace.

The sleeves were tight and ended in a gorgeous fril . It was exquisite, but Roberta thought that Jemma was right. It was boring.

She had no say in the matter; al the other dresses, luscious in deep crimson and striped green, were whisked away, and Brigitte got down to the serious business of altering the white gown to fit.

“You wil look like a fairy princess at the bal ,” Brigitte said with great satisfaction. “Al the princes wil bow at your feet.”

It seemed to Roberta that Vil iers was not the sort to bow at the feet of an innocent fairy princess, but how could she complain? He wouldn’t genuflect at the feet of the fleshy crocodile dressed in gold paint either; she was certain of that. She would have to study him closely in order to decide precisely how to pitch her courtship.

By the time Roberta made it out of her bedchamber it was late in the afternoon. Her father’s house was large, but Beaumont House was far larger. Within the turn of a corridor, she was lost.

Part of the problem was that she wasn’t concentrating on finding her way. Perhaps Jemma was right. An innocent dress was like a suit of armor, insuring that no one would remember that the Mad Marquess lived with his courtesan, which meant that she, Roberta, had lived in close proximity with that same woman. On the whole, Roberta felt that her friendships with her father’s companions had been interesting. But obviously, one might not wish to trumpet those acquaintances around a bal room.

She had climbed another flight of stairs, and was wandering down a sun-lit corridor lined with closed doors, which she thought might be taking her back to the central part of the house, when she heard a patter of feet.

He burst around the corner going as fast as only a smal boy can go.

Roberta guessed immediately that this was Damon’s son, and decided there was no cal to halt him. So she moved aside so that he could use the rest of the corridor as a race course, if he wished. But he skidded to a stop next to her.

Pop went his thumb into his mouth.

Roberta shuddered inwardly. She had had very little contact with children in her life, but she’d seen thumb-sucking in church. The very fact that someone would want to suck on a saliva-covered digit was disgusting.

He was staring up at her, so she smiled. He wasn’t a terrible-looking child, just tousled. It seemed that no one had brushed his hair. Of course, there was no nanny.

“Feel free to continue running,” she advised him.

He just stared. And sucked.

So she continued to walk. He walked right along beside her.

“What’s your name?” she asked, trying to be friendly.

“Teddy,” he said. In order to answer he took his thumb out with a “pop.”

Roberta shuddered again. Enough polite conversation.

But a moment later he dropped the thumb of his own volition and said, “Whatcha doing?”

“Walking,” she said.

“It’s running, I am,” he said.

“I am running,” she corrected him. Perhaps that was a bit harsh, but after life with her father she had very little sympathy for inverted syntax, poetic or otherwise.

“Right,” he said. At least he didn’t start sucking again. But he suddenly waxed eloquent. “Don’t have a nanny.”

“I don’t have a nanny,” she repeated.

“Right. The nanny, her name was Peg—”

“The nanny’s name was Peg.”

“Yes, her name was Peg and her brother was sent to Bridewel Prison because he stole a sow and her piglets and then he stole a butter churn and put the piglets in it.”

He paused, but Roberta had no comment about the butter churn or the piglets, and his sentence was reasonably grammatical.

So they continued like that down the hal and around the curve, with Roberta occasional y interjecting a grammatical comment, and Teddy tel ing her at length about various criminal deeds. Some of his stories were rather involved and, had Roberta not had a great deal of experience in decoding cryptic literature, might have been misinterpreted.

“Do I understand you to say,” she said some time later, “that the housemaid with the beard, whose name is Carper, is married to a wild bog-trotting croggie, whatever that is, but she has a child by a Captain Longshanks?”

Teddy corrected her. Apparently Carper had a mustache as wel , and the signal point of his story was that she had more facial hair than the captain.

To Roberta, the more interesting point was the wild bog-trotting croggie.

Teddy admitted that he couldn’t describe Carper’s husband, but launched into a tale of Carper’s sister, who bought an ointment entitled the Tomb of Venus, which gave her a terrible swel ing.

“A dire name. She should have chosen something more propitious.”

After she had explained the meaning of
dire
and
propitious
, and final y,
tomb,
Teddy said that the swel ing was al in front, and Carper said that it was an il -prepared medicine and that Dr. Jackson’s worm powder would have been better.

Final y she saw the great winding stair leading down the central core of the house, so she told Teddy to run off to his nursery.

He blinked up at her and then popped his thumb back in his mouth.

“You’re too old for that,” she told him. “Why, you must be ten years old at the very least.”

“Six,” he said around his thumb.