Eloisa James - Desperate Duchesses - 6 (3 page)

"Of course."

"You declared that you would marry a duke or no one, knowing full well that no one was likely to propose, since there are so few of us. I see." "You
do?"

"As you reminded me, I'm not young. I have seen a great deal and I certainly understand desire."

"Oh." Eleanor was a bit uncertain about what had happened to the subject of their conversation.

"Are you saying that you understand my desire?"

"You should not throw your life away, Lady Eleanor, simply because you love elsewhere."

"How did you know that?" She looked up at him. "You just told me."

"I did?" He had remarkably heavy-lidded eyes, lazy and seemingly uninterested, and yet apparently they saw everything.

"I am not a conventional man," Villiers stated.

With a start, Eleanor realized that if she did decide to marry the duke, she'd have to discuss the question of virginity or, specifically, her lack thereof. "Given your promiscuous progeny, I agree that you have no claim to conventionality."

One corner of his mouth quirked up. It had a remarkably beautiful shape, actually. "Oh, you'd be surprised. Men do the most interesting things in their private time and yet disparage women who commit even a tenth of the follies they enjoy."

"That's true." Gideon was the only man she knew who was punctilious as a Puritan when it came to virtue, as passionate about his honor as he had been about her.

"My point is that I am not a prude when it comes to human desire. I know how inconvenient it can be."

Inconvenient was an odd word for the way love for Gideon had shaped her life, but she saw his point.

Villiers tipped up her chin. "If you help me with my children, rear them, be kind to them, and fight society's belief that they are unworthy of the huge settlements I intend to give them, I will be lenient with regard to your personal life."

"You mean—"

"I would ask you to tolerate me only long enough to produce an heir."

"In fact, I want children," she said. She did want children. And for all Villiers's tolerance, she had no intention of straying from her marital vows, once she made them. After all, Gideon showed no interest. He had barely met her eyes these last three years. She knew he was at the ball tonight only because Anne told her. He hadn't searched her out, and of course she hadn't looked for him.

And more to the point, if she took vows, she would keep to them. Just as she had tried to keep to the vows she and Gideon had said to each other, private though they were.

Villiers smiled and the shape of his mouth caught her eye again. "I appreciate your saying so."

"You
appreciate
it?"

He nodded. "Like any other duke, I need an heir. But other than that, I must say that I have no deep desire for children."

"And yet you have so many," she observed. "Carelessness," he said.

"Stupidity," she said, before she could bite her tongue.

"That too," he agreed. "I need an heir, but I would be perfectly happy to live an amicable existence with a wife who had no interest in my charms, such as they are. Although I would ask that you be discreet."

Without question this was the most shocking conversation she had ever had. Her mother would have fainted a good five minutes ago. "Will you do the same?"

"Will I add even more miscellaneous children to the household?" And, when she nodded,

"Absolutely not. I am keenly aware of the idiocy of my imprudent attitude toward conception." He paused. "You might not be aware of this, but there are ways to prevent conception; as a young man, I simply didn't care to employ those methods."

She nodded again. She knew them.

His eyes narrowed. "What an interesting young lady you are, Lady Eleanor." "Why have you decided to house your own children?" "I nearly died last year of a wound sustained in a duel." His voice was flat, uncommunicative. "I fought that duel for the honor of my fiancee, and lost."

"Apparently, you lost the fiancée as well," she put in dryly, trying to avoid any sort of melodramatic revelation.

Sure enough, his mouth eased. "True. The Duchess of Beaumont's brother, the Earl of Gryffyn, won the girl and the duel, leaving me with a wound that nearly carried me off."

"Whereupon you made a deathbed vow to marry?"

His eyelashes flickered. They were very long eyelashes.

"No," she guessed. "You made a deathbed vow to rear your own children."

"That was it," he confirmed. "The damnable thing about it was that I turned out to be not entirely sure where those children were."

"Beyond carelessness," she said. "That's disgraceful."

"I had been paying for them." He abruptly stooped down and snatched up a handful of flowers, sending a small wave across the pool. "When I demanded their addresses, my solicitor handed me a partial list and disappeared, along with many hundreds of pounds, I might add."

"How very odd."

"It seems that he had gradually removed the children from their lodgings and placed them elsewhere, pocketing the money I provided for their upkeep." Villiers threw the blossoms back toward the pool. They rained down into the blanket of violets.

"Not the workhouse!"

"Less scrupulous places," he said evenly. "A workhouse might have explored parentage, after all. To this point I have located my son Tobias, who was working as a mudlark, gathering valuables from the bottom of the River Thames."

"Damn," she said. Quietly, but she said it.

"A lady who swears?" He had that mocking tone in his voice again.

She ignored him. "How old is Tobias?"

"Thirteen. I recently found Violet, who is six, living in a brothel. I believe she is too young to know what lay in wait for her. She is untouched." Eleanor shuddered. "Horrible."

"Colin is eleven years old, and had been apprenticed to a weaver."

"That's three...where are the others? And where are their mothers?"

"Well, you see," he said grimly, "I offered to take the children away from their mothers at birth. I thought that they would be better off under my care than they might be under the care of a courtesan."

"The irony is rather distressing."

"One of those mothers refused; Genevieve lives with her mother in Surrey." "So Genevieve is well."

"Yes. My solicitor had ceased to pay support for the child, but her mother managed to scrape by."

"In her former employment?"

He shook his head. "Taking in washing."

There was something quite hard about his voice, the kind of hardness that concealed deep shame, she guessed. Since he deserved every ounce of that shame, she didn't bother with soothing pleasantries.

"So that's Tobias, Genevieve, Colin, and Violet. What fanciful names. There are two more? Why haven't you fetched them?" Which was a tactful way of asking why he was at the ball at all, under the circumstances.

"They are twin girls. And I've been looking."

"You can't find them?"

"I have Bow Street Runners searching for them. They did find the woman who originally cared for them, but she has no idea where they were taken. She was merely told they were being sent to an orphanage. It turns out there are a great many orphanages in England, and a surprising number of twins."

"Surely...their surnames, their parentage?"

"My solicitor, Templeton, never shared information as to their parentage. Apparently that is common practice, as it does not allow the nurse to appeal directly to the father, who prefers to ignore the child's existence."

She sighed and walked back up the stairs. The air was too moist, and the last thing she needed was for her inadequately powdered hair to start curling in all directions.

Villiers kept pace with her, his long legs sending him effortlessly upward. "I heard just this morning that twins of approximately the right age are living in an orphanage in the village of Sevenoaks, in Kent."

"Lady Lisette Elys, daughter of the Duke of Gilner, lives nearby and might be able to help you. She does a great deal of work with the poor."

"How..." He paused. "How odd. I had considered paying a visit to the duke."

She said the obvious. "Lisette is the only other eligible duke's daughter of whom I'm aware, given that my sister Elizabeth is only fourteen. Ducal progeny is quite rare, and when one is shopping for a wife, one ought to inspect all the available merchandise."

"Are you encouraging me to pay a visit to the Gilner estate?" he asked curiously.

She looked up at him. He wasn't beautiful. He was the opposite of Gideon, the man whom she loved with all her heart. Gideon had golden ringlets that curled at his neck like angel kisses. In fact, Gideon wasn't like any other man she knew, more like a true angel, with his ethical heart and his serious blue eyes.

This duke...this one was no angel. Villiers was all human, in his flaws, in the deep lines by the side of his mouth, the crinkles at his eyes that didn't look as if they came from smiling. He talked without shame of his illegitimate children. He was a man. No angel, a man.

And not even a very good man.

"I am fond of Lisette. Perhaps she would be a better duchess than I." She couldn't make herself care very much what Villiers decided. Though Anne's prickly comments were in the back of her mind, poking her, reminding her that she ought to make an effort to marry. Why not marry this duke?

"I would be a very comfortable type of husband," he said, clearly trying to be persuasive, though he sounded merely repetitive. It was a typically foolish male comment, because no one could look twice at the Duke of Villiers and imagine that living with him

would be comfortable.

"I begin to think that you protest too much," she said, smiling. "I suspect you're a tyrant in private life."

"Never having had anyone to tyrannize, I can hardly defend myself. Did you know that your eyes are the exact color of wet violets? You must trail a string of broken hearts, given your provocative declaration as regards marriage."

Eleanor discovered that she had accidentally crushed the few blossoms she had carried away with her, and dropped them. "Not provocative as much as overly proud. And I have never found that men experienced a great deal of sorrow at the idea of not marrying me." She had been stupid to think that modest clothing would attract the right man, an honorable man. Perhaps just the right man had been in London, but had rejected her, based on her starchy reputation.

She could flaunt her bosom and chase men up and down shady alleys. Or she could just marry the duke in front of her, since he was there. At hand. Women had married for worse reasons.

"Are yours nice children?" she asked.

He blinked. "I haven't the faintest idea."

"Didn't you say that three of them are now in your nursery?"

"Yes."

"Surely you have visited them? I would imagine that moving from brothel to ducal town house would be rather shocking."

"Did your father pay visits to the nursery?"

"Yes, he did. Though more often we were summoned to the drawing room."

"I haven't got around to summoning them yet," Villiers said, an uneasy look in his eye. "My housekeeper found some nannies and I assume everyone is comfortable."

Eleanor didn't like the sound of that. She thought it unlikely that the duke's household had simply absorbed the presence of three bastard children without significant upheaval. Servants tended to be far more conservative than their masters. The ton would surely look askance at the presence of such children under the duke's roof once they learned of it, which meant that his servants were probably mutinying belowstairs. Not that it was her business. Still...

"I have meant to visit Lisette these past two years," she said, surprising herself. He bowed. "Perhaps I might meet you in Sevenoaks."

Eleanor put her fingers on his outstretched arm. "I shall have to ask my mother, Your Grace. She may not be free to accompany me to Kent."

He smiled down at her. He knew as well as she did that her mother would throw all her engagements to the wind in order to further a marriage between the Duke of Villiers and her daughter, but he was polite enough not to point it out. "Of course."

"She will not be happy to learn of your family," she observed, in a coda to the unspoken question of her mother's approval of any prospective betrothal.

"Which makes it all the more surprising to discover that you are so calmly accepting of their existence. It seems you resemble neither your father nor your mother, Lady Eleanor."

"I am certainly temperamentally different from my parents. And you, do you resemble your parents?"

"They are both dead. I hardly knew my father, and had very little to say to my mother." There was something in his voice that did not welcome further enquiry on that front. "Where is your country seat?" she asked.

He looked down at her and said, "You really don't know anything about me, do you?" "Why should I?"

"There are so few dukes that I know quite a lot about them without even trying. I believe your brother is great friends with young Duke of Astley, for example." "Indeed." She climbed the stairs.

"I haven't seen Astley in a few years," Villiers said. "I suppose you know him well."

"As you say, he is friends with my brother. He spent a great deal of time with us while we were all growing up," Eleanor said steadily. "Of course now that he's married, we see him much less frequently. I believe we shall find my mother in the refreshments tent."

"You should probably remove this curl," he said. With a start, she realized that one of the fat curls Rackfort had pinned into her hair was dangling by one pin alone. Villiers's fingers brushed her cheek; he twisted and the curl lay in his palm.

"It looks like a country slug," Eleanor said. She pulled off the other one as well.

"As opposed to a city slug?"

"A city slug would be wearing powder," she said, smiling at him. She tossed the slugs into a nearby hedge.

He almost smiled back. She could see it in his eyes. "Would you like me to escort you to your mother?"

If the duke arrived at her mother's side, with Eleanor on his arm, rumors of a betrothal would flare through London. "I believe not," she said. "I shall consider the matter, Your Grace. Perhaps, if I decide to continue our acquaintance, I shall pay a visit to Kent."