It was one of the strangest moments of her life.
Then Her Grace proceeded to pull most of Minerva’s life history out of her as threatened—including her employment with Lady Blundersmith, which she hadn’t even mentioned to the viscount. But the duchess spoke no more of her strange insinuations in the garden, for which Minerva was grateful. Minerva was not prepared to let her mind even touch upon the implications of her and the viscount . . .
No. Just—
No.
But when Lady Elizabeth somehow let it slip that Minerva was a Misstopher—which she wasn’t, for heaven’s sake, though she’d yet to convince Lady Elizabeth otherwise (or herself, deep down)—that calculating gleam returned to the duchess’s eyes, and she grinned like a cat that got the cream.
And a nice plump mouse.
And a few unsuspecting birds.
Minerva had absolutely no idea what that was about, and she thought briefly about demanding an accounting from Her Grace—even though the woman was one of the most powerful duchesses in the realm. But then the subject turned away from Minerva completely—thank hell—since Lady Elizabeth was off on her favorite subject: Essex, and her intention to wed him instead of Poxley Oxley.
Both the duchess and Lady Brinderley thought this so amusing for some reason that they were overcome by laughter for several minutes. Lady Brinderley finally gripped her belly and moaned, “No more, or I shall give birth right here.”
That prospect was one of the most horrifying things Minerva had ever heard. She was glad the ladies calmed down enough a few seconds later to avoid such a messy outcome, but she gripped her saucer with white knuckles in the meanwhile, thankful Inigo had been summoned in case the worst happened.
“I don’t see why you think that is so funny,” Lady Elizabeth said haughtily, stung by the ladies’ reaction. It had been rather excessive. “I know you think me silly and I know it is likely never to occur, but I am determined to have my silly little hopes. Otherwise, I am liable to give into despair.”
Minerva’s heart promptly sank at the bleak look on Lady Elizabeth’s face. So too did the other ladies’, if their contrite expressions were anything to go by. That had certainly taken the wind out of their sails.
“Of course you should have hope,” the duchess said firmly. “And never fear. We are all on your side. You won’t have to marry that odious man.”
Lady Elizabeth’s smile was tight. “I hope you’re right.”
“Of course I am,” the duchess said briskly and with full confidence in the matter.
Minerva could only wish for Lady Elizabeth’s sake that the duchess was right. At the very least, the girl deserved a husband that wasn’t half a century her senior. At best, she deserved to have many, many more years to grow into herself before she even contemplated marriage. But women were allowed few choices when it came to such matters—especially for someone in Lady Elizabeth’s position, who had a father determined to barter her off to the highest bidder at the first opportunity.
Minerva may not have had the ideal upbringing, but she’d be forever thankful the captain had never sought to marry her off. She’d had the chance, however short-lived, to marry for love—a rare occurrence indeed for any woman.
Minerva’s fate had been proscribed almost entirely by her sex and her father’s limited income, and her only real option to escape penury—or worse—was marriage or the sort of half life lived by governesses or companions (both of which were as near to penury as to make no difference). When she’d met Arthur, however, she’d decided that marriage might not be a terrible thing if she could marry a man like him, a man who could steer the helm of his own fate and offer her a place at his side.
Though the chances were slim indeed, Minerva hoped Lady Elizabeth would one day be given the same opportunity.
“But I don’t think it wise to set your hopes on Mr. Essex,” the duchess continued gently. “He could be anyone. A haberdasher from Cheapside with five children and a fishwife. Or Poxley Oxley himself. He could even be a she for all we know.”
“Or Marlowe,” Lady Brinderley murmured, eyes dancing.
Lady Elizabeth shuddered, and they all laughed at the absurdity of the idea, the mood restored.
Marlowe indeed. That seemed more unlikely than a haberdasher.
CHAPTER NINE
IN WHICH MARLOWE GETS HIS MUSE BACK
IT ONLY TOOK Marlowe one night to finish the ode—his first half-decent work in nearly three years—and it was just going on midmorning by the time he was penning the final draft at his library desk. Only a few more lines were left before it was done, and he held his breath as he wrote them out . . .
. . . The nymph who warmed my bed, to me it seems,
The frigid stone of winter after all.
He applied the final full stop with aplomb.
Perfect. His eyes felt like sandpaper, his mouth tasted as if something had crawled in it and died, and his shirtsleeves were stained in ink. But despite all that, he felt better than he had in months—in years. He’d been half-afraid he’d never write another decent word, but it seemed that his dry spell had, at last, ended.
All it had taken, then, was seeing his governess’s naked legs.
He’d had a momentary pang of guilt about his choice of material sometime after midnight and halfway through the second stanza. He knew it was wrong of him to be so exploitative, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. The inspiration had been just too good, and he knew even before he put the pen to paper that it would be the best work he’d done in years.
But while it wasn’t complete rubbish, he doubted he would be submitting this one to Waverley, no matter how desperate his avaricious little publisher was to sink his teeth into a new manuscript. For one, the ode had ended up a bit too self-pitying for his taste, even for a poet known for his hyperbolic angst. For another, he’d used his governess’s naked flesh as inspiration, and even though he was the only one who’d ever know the inspiration for the poem’s nymph, it just didn’t seem right exposing her to the public eye.
Though he’d had little problem exposing his bleeding heart and broken soul in his past works to his readers—albeit anonymously—he couldn’t do the same with his latest creation. It was too private, too fragile—just like his feelings for Miss Jones altogether.
He’d admired her from the start, adored her vicious tongue and unfiltered banter. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind or challenge him, that was for sure. Perhaps she was sometimes quick to judgment, as she’d seemed to have made up her mind about him long before their meeting in Kent, but she was not inflexible and not afraid of being proven wrong. But she wasn’t all prickly bits: she was kind to his daughters and deferential to Chippers, despite the housekeeper’s gruff manner, and had even managed to wrangle Betsy into something resembling good behavior.
He liked her. He liked her more every time he saw her, and though he’d never found himself drawn to pocket-size brunettes in the past, he’d been attracted to her from the moment he saw her half drowned in that Kentish ditch. Perhaps it had been those flashing storm-cloud eyes, or the angry roses in her alabaster cheeks, or the selkie grace of her small body even in the throes of a pique. Perhaps it was all of her.
But the lust—pure, consuming, and shameless—had not come until her ignominious fall by the fountain. He was a red-blooded man, after all, and there had been a rather lot of naked flesh on display. He had a vivid imagination, but none of his secret daydreams could have ever prepared him for the reality of what was underneath all of those drab muslin layers.
He had discovered, to his delight, that her skin was flawlessly alabaster from top to toe—and when she blushed, she blushed all over, infusing all of that gorgeous marble with the prettiest, most delicate rose glow. It had made him want to put his hands all over her with an urgency he’d never felt before.
He couldn’t very well attack his governess in broad daylight (or at all), or even bring himself to more covertly seduce her—though the thought had cro
ssed his mind once (or a hundred times). She was his employee and the first capable minder of the twins he’d ever found. It would be positively criminal to act on his desires—to tempt a decent woman under his protection into sin, no matter how much he wanted her.
Besides, he doubted he could tempt her. Despite their banter, despite her grudging acceptance of him as a friend in recent weeks, she would never want him like that. No matter his attempts at reformation, he would always be, to her mind, the buffoon in a banyan who’d fallen on her breasts and gotten her sacked.
No, he could not seduce her. But Christopher Essex could, on a sheet of foolscap, for the duration of four stanzas, at least. And though she’d never read the poem, he’d have the cold comfort of knowing she’d like it if she did.
She liked everything Essex wrote, he thought sulkily . . .
And apparently he was jealous of himself—of her steadfast and uncomplicated admiration of an unknown poet.
Yet another reason—childish as it was—to keep the ode to himself. Knowing Miss Jones would read the poem but have no idea it was about her—or that he had written it—seemed the worst sort of torture.
His good mood in finishing the ode promptly ended, however, when Mrs. Chips had the effrontery to announce a visitor. The last person he wanted to see cross the threshold of his library was Nigel Waverley . . . well, the second to last, as his father would always hold pride of place in Marlowe’s private pantheon of undesirables. But when his sire was in West Barming, his publisher definitely moved to the top of the list—especially in the midst of his endless creative drought. And especially now, when the drought had finally ended.
He wanted to bang his head on the desktop as Waverley marched into the room, but he manfully restrained himself despite his exhausted irritation. It was as if the man knew precisely how Marlowe had spent the night, damn him.
“You know, harassing me won’t make me magically pull a sonnet out of my arse, Waverley.”
“A man can hope,” Waverley said shortly. He was a small, whippet-thin man with the face of a hungry weasel and gold spectacles perched on a thin nose. Marlowe’s previous works had made Waverley a rich man, but like everyone who’d had a whiff of success, he wanted even more. Judging by the expensive cut of the man’s jacket and his Hoby boots, he’d developed quite expensive tastes over the past few years.
Marlowe had given him The Italian Poem two and a half years ago, and doubtless his coffers were running low. Hence the last year of increasingly urgent visits. But Marlowe couldn’t give Waverley what he didn’t have—and he certainly wasn’t prepared to give him “The Alabaster Hip.”
“But what’s all this?” Waverley demanded of Marlowe’s cluttered desk and stained fingers. His beady eyes had a rather maniacal glint to them behind his gold spectacles. “Have you been writing, then?”
“No,” Marlowe lied, covering “The Alabaster Hip” with his hands, wincing inwardly at himself for being so very unsubtle. Waverley gave him an appropriately doubtful look. “It’s a letter to . . . my, er, father.”
Waverley looked even more suspicious. “You hate your father.”
“Don’t mean I don’t write letters to him,” he grumbled. “Estate business and all.”
Waverley didn’t believe him for a second but seemed willing to indulge in the lie. “Fine. But please tell me you’re working on something.”
“Of course,” he hedged. He was always working on something, even if it was a blank page.
“Because it’s been three years.”
“Two and a half,” he corrected.
“I need something, my lord,” Waverley said, frustrated. “Murray is running us to ground with Byron’s new cantos. And I don’t have to tell you about the absolute splash Adonais has made.”
“And yet you just did,” he muttered.
“For God’s sake, Keats is outselling you, and he’s dead!”
Marlowe winced at the reminder. The young man’s death had shaken him—had made the last year even more unbearably dreary than the ones before it. In his humble opinion, Keats had put him and all of their contemporaries to shame, and it was a tragedy to have lost him so soon. Shelley might have turned his grief into a masterful elegy, but Marlowe had buried his in the bottle and abandoned the pen entirely.
“Perhaps I should cock up my toes so you may reap the profits,” he groused.
“That would be a wonderful idea,” Waverley said, completely bloody serious. “But no one knows who you are.”
Unfortunately, Marlowe could see where this meeting was going. His continued anonymity had been a longstanding bone of contention for Waverley.
“If you’re still . . . struggling . . .” Waverley began much too innocently.
“Struggling?” Marlowe scoffed, offended. He hated it when Waverley talked about his unproductivity in such honest terms. “I’m not struggling. I’m taking my time.”
Waverley clenched his jaw in annoyance and forged onward. “While you’re ‘taking your time,’” he said dubiously, “why not announce publicly that you are Christopher Essex? We might reissue your whole catalogue then. The number of people clamoring for your work when they know you, Lord Marlowe, are the poet, would be . . .”
“No,” he said flatly.
“But . . .”
“No. And if you even think of doing so without my permission, I will eviscerate you.”
Sometimes Marlowe was grateful for his pugnacious reputation, for Waverley’s protests died immediately, and he paled slightly at the threat.
“I don’t understand you,” Waverley grumbled. “Why are you so determined to remain anonymous?”
Frankly, Marlowe wasn’t quite sure he had a good reason for it anymore, but at first, publishing as Christopher Essex had been a strategically defensive move. He’d endured years of his family’s mockery and abuse, and he’d been quite certain he’d not survive the world’s, not when it came to his poetry and the intimate, inner world inside of him that it exposed.
And while Marlowe was usually quite keen on sticking it to Barming, he’d never wanted to publish his work simply to spite the old man. He’d not make his poetry—that one part of himself he’d held completely inviolable—part of his feud with his father. It was too sacred, too essential to the maintenance of his soul, to be sullied by the earl’s inevitable denigration.
As a child, Marlowe would have lived in the library if he could have gotten away with it, but his father had done his level best to beat out what he saw as his heir’s failure to be properly masculine. The earl had a distressingly medieval view on manhood. Books and learning weren’t to be enjoyed—they were to be tolerated only until they’d served their purpose. Real men—like the earl, like Evander—enjoyed hunting and gambling, brawling and wenching, not Shakespeare and Milton and Donne.
So he’d learned to hide that part of himself from an early age and instead became quite adept at the manly pursuits endorsed by his father—especially brawling, for he’d been, unsurprisingly, a very angry child.
Things had not improved. An adolescent Caroline, who’d been raised by a man with similar opinions to his own father, had laughed the first and only time he’d tried to give her a poem. He probably should have taken that rejection as a sign of things to come, but his puppy love had blinded him to all of the ways they didn’t fit together.
Later on, after things had completely fallen apart between them, she’d mocked his work—early drafts of some of his sonnets—when he’d been stupid enough to leave it out on his writing desk. She’d called him names that didn’t bear repeating, as unimpressed as his father had been with his “hobby.”
After the war, after Caroline’s and Evander’s deaths, when he’d finally worked up the nerve to publish the sonnets—if only to exorcize those demons from his soul—he’d never even thought to do so under his own name. He’d long stopped caring what his father thought, but still that deeply ingrained fear that he’d carried around since the first time his father had jerked a book from
his hands must have remained. Perhaps he was a coward to still be hiding behind his nom de plume, but he’d yet to find a reason for courage.
Enough he was published at all—though sometimes he regretted even that.
“I couldn’t care less what you understand,” Marlowe finally said in his best lord-of-the-manor tone.
Waverley’s shoulders slumped, as they always did at the end of one of their tiffs about Essex.
“You’ve nothing then? No small work we might sell to the broadsheets?”
Marlowe narrowed his eyes and wondered if Waverley had set spies on him in the night. “You must be in dun territory to even think of selling to the broadsheets.”
Waverley scowled at him. “Business is slow, my lord. I’m tempted to drop you completely and spend my time on someone who actually produces.”
Marlowe shrugged, completely unbothered by the empty threat. He wasn’t writing or publishing for the money anyway, and Waverley’s badgering hardly made him want to cooperate. Besides, Waverley would murder his firstborn if he thought it would bring him Essex’s next manuscript, and they both knew it.
“Do what you like, Waverley. I am quite content to look elsewhere as well. Do you know, I met Murray just last year at Tatt’s. I found him quite an agreeable fellow.”
Waverley’s cheeks grew ruddy at the mention of his nemesis. Of course, Marlowe had absolutely no intention of approaching Murray, but Waverley’s constipated look was priceless.
Marlowe stood up from his desk and began to herd the man from his study. He did not have time to deal with any more of Waverley’s nonsense.
“Now if you don’t mind, I’m busy.”
“But . . .”
“Soon, Waverley,” he promised, and this time he actually meant it. Now that he’d produced an ode, he felt absolutely invigorated.
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