“Not at all,” he said, attempting to slide the print to the bottom of the pile so she wouldn’t see it.
He wasn’t fast enough, not for Charlotte’s sharp eyes.
“What is this you’re trying to hide?” she asked mildly. She set the basket of flowers on the floor and darted around his chair to pull the folded print free. “Have you run up an exceptionally high reckoning with your tailor that you don’t wish me to see?”
“Please, Charlotte, that’s nothing you should see,” he said sternly, trying to wrest it away from her. “Give it to me.”
“Why should I, when you order me as rudely as that?” Laughing, she stepped backward with her prize, and opened it before he could take it back. Her laughter vanished at once, her smile faded, and her cheeks flushed as if feeling shame for her printed, pieced-together self.
“I told you that you’d not wish to see it,” March said. “I’m sorry that you did.”
She gave a jerky small shake to her head, enough to make the fine ruffles on her linen cap flutter about her face. “No, it’s better that I do. But who would concoct such a dreadful thing? You don’t think Sir Lucas—”
“No,” March said. “Sir Lucas would not debase his art that way. He might be selling prints of his drawing of you—that’s to be expected, considering who you are—but he would never make a version like this, or risk ruining his career.”
“But it must be someone who has seen the drawing, to copy it so,” she said. “Perhaps it was copied by one of the apprentices in his studio?”
He felt the anger growing inside him, fueled by the sight of her standing there, with one hand holding the vile print and the other resting on the slight swell of her belly. He doubted she even realized she’d placed that protective hand there over her unborn child; she did it instinctively now, a natural gesture for a mother. Now, too, it was his turn as a husband and father to defend them.
“Here, Charlotte, please,” he said, stepping forward to reclaim the print. “I don’t want you distressed any further by some stranger’s malicious jest. Give it no more thought. I’ll make sure the villains who did this are discovered and punished.”
But she heard the anger in his voice, or perhaps because she knew him so well, she simply sensed it.
“If you truly don’t wish to distress me, March, then you won’t go chasing off after ‘villains,’ ” she said, resting a cautionary hand on his arm. “I don’t require an avenging fury on my behalf. The worst that’s been done is that I’ve been called a foul name that we both know isn’t true, and shown with an ample chest that we both know isn’t mine, either.”
“Don’t diminish this, Charlotte,” he said sharply. “This is an egregious slander against you, me, and our child as well. By insulting your virtue in this fashion, they’re also implying that I’m not the father of your babe, and I won’t have our child dogged with that all his life.”
“Or hers,” she said. “You must remember that possibility, March.”
“Charlotte, don’t wander,” he said. “There could be scores of these things about London by now. I want the printer and the artist found and punished for libeling you, and all the copies burned and the plate destroyed.”
“An avenging fury indeed,” she said wryly. “If you make a fuss like that, then you’ll only make more people speak of it, and wish to find a copy that’s escaped your wrath. Better simply to let the whole affair drift away as a seven-day wonder, and then be forgotten.”
“But it won’t be forgotten,” he insisted. “Scandal never is.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “especially if the scandalmongers are treated to the delicious tattle of the mighty Duke of Marchbourne with his scourge in hand, raging after some low printer of penny broadsides.”
He looked down into her bottomless blue eyes and wished desperately for a way to make her understand. He knew he didn’t sound rational to her. If he thought more about it, he likely wouldn’t sound rational to himself, either. Trying to track down who knew how many prints scattered over the countryside would be next to impossible, and finding the man responsible for creating the scurrilous print would be even harder. But for her sake, he’d do it. For her, he’d do anything.
“Charlotte,” he began again. “I must do this for the sake of your honor and good name.”
“I know you feel that way, my love, but I wish you wouldn’t.” She slipped her arms around his neck and gazed up at him, the kind of imploring no sane man could resist. “Please, March. For my sake, ignore it.”
He frowned and grumbled. “It’s not as if I’ll be chasing the rascals through the streets myself, Charlotte. I’ll have my lawyers look after it. A few inquiries should be sufficient.”
Her arms tightened around his shoulders. “A few inquiries would be excessive. Put it from your thoughts, my love, as I already have done.”
He grumbled again and kissed her, letting her think he’d agreed. Which he hadn’t, not exactly. But while he was busily kissing her, she pulled the folded print from his fingers and swiftly tossed it into the grate.
“There,” she said. “Now it’s truly done, and that’s an end to it.”
But as March watched the paper curl and blacken in the flames, he wasn’t nearly as sure.
“I wish we didn’t have to come to London,” Charlotte said, curled in the corner of the coach. “I wish we could always stay at Greenwood. And I most heartily wish I did not have to be presented at court. Why couldn’t His Majesty wait until I was done breeding?”
“Because His Majesty is extraordinarily old,” March said, sitting across from her, “and he might not be able to wait another five months for you. Besides, how can I refuse his wish to meet my beautiful wife?”
“Your portly wife,” Charlotte said gloomily. Although she seemed finally over the worst of being ill in the mornings, her waist was thickening and her breasts were blossoming at an astonishing rate. Already Polly had had to change her stay laces three times to longer lengths, and the gap in the back was yawning so large that she’d soon outgrow them altogether, and require new ones in a properly gargantuan size. “Clearly this child takes after you, and is determined to be the most prodigious baby ever born.”
“All the more reason for you to be presented to His Majesty, so that he might marvel,” March said. “But you are not portly, Charlotte. Far from it. You are beautiful. You’re even more beautiful now than when we wed.”
His gaze wandered lower. “I especially like that gown on you. Every gentleman there tonight will be ogling you and envying me.”
She grinned—not at the possibility of other gentlemen ogling her, but at the idea of her own husband doing exactly that. He wasn’t offering idle flattery, either. In these last weeks he’d frequently demonstrated that he found her more luxurious figure irresistible.
Not only was she happy to reap the benefits of his attentions—and often, too—but it also meant he hadn’t time to be fussing over that ridiculous lewd print and whoever had circulated it three weeks before. She understood why he’d been upset, for no one prized honor and respectability as much as March did. But he hadn’t said a word about it since, and she was relieved beyond measure. A lustful March was much, much better than an angry, vengeful one.
She leaned forward, offering him a better (and quite spectacular) view of her décolletage, draped in diamonds.
“Perhaps we should send our regrets to Lady Tewksbury,” she suggested in a low, breathy voice, running her hand along the inside of March’s thigh. “I find I’m feeling weak, and I must return home to my bed.”
March groaned. “Don’t I wish we could,” he said. “But this supper’s in our honor, and even if you were lingering at death’s door, Lady Tewksbury herself would come and haul you back to grace her table.”
A quarter hour later, they were in Lady Tewksbury’s drawing room. March had been right: as soon as they stepped through the door, the countess had swept down upon them like some bright-feathered bird of prey, and hadn’t relinq
uished possession yet. One after another, Lady Tewksbury introduced Charlotte to a seemingly endless line of eager, aristocratic faces that were all new to her.
And then, finally, came one that was all too familiar.
“The Marquess of Andover, ma’am,” Lady Tewksbury said as he bowed before Charlotte. He’d been drinking already, enough that she could smell it on him, and his broad face was even redder than usual. Yet still she blushed furiously, remembering that the last time they’d seen each other, he’d been roaring out a window while she’d been berating him from a tree.
“Your Grace,” he murmured as he rose. The expression beneath his powdered wig was blank and impassive, without a hint that he, too, recalled how they’d last parted. “I am honored, ma’am.”
She nodded, and that was all. Then he moved on to repeat much the same exchange with March, and Charlotte gave a quick sigh of relief as another Lord and Lady Someone were introduced to her. The couple smiled and bowed and curtseyed, as pleasant as could be, but Charlotte instantly forgot the names that went with their pleasant faces because what happened next blotted out everything else.
“What was that you said, sir?” March demanded, his voice so loud and furious that every other conversation in the room ceased.
He addressed Lord Andover; it could be no other gentleman. But Lord Andover had already moved away from March into a crowd of other guests, all of whom now melted away from him. He turned slowly, a half smile on his face, as if March had only called to him in greeting from across a park.
“Sir?” he said blithely, the exact kind of feigned innocence calculated to anger March further. “You address me, sir?”
“Damnation, Andover, you know that I do,” March thundered. “I heard what you said, and I mark your meaning.”
“Forgive me, sir,” Lord Andover said, his disingenuous smile twitching into a smirk, “but I was merely amusing these gentlemen here with a scrap of verse, though I disremember where I heard it first.”
Charlotte grabbed March’s arm before he could speak again. She knew her husband better than anyone else did, and she understood all the reasons why this print was such an irritant to him and so dangerous to them both.
“Stop, please, my love, don’t do this,” she begged. “It doesn’t matter, not at all.”
He put his hand over hers protectively, but to her sorrow he didn’t turn away from the marquess. “If it was so amusing, Andover, then pray repeat it for the entertainment of the rest of the company.”
The marquess seemed to sway gently on his feet, his pale-lashed eyes glassy. Clearly he was more drunk than Charlotte had realized, drunk enough to behave like this, and her dread for what could happen only grew.
Too late the random pieces fell together to make an unsavory whole: how Lord Andover had seen both her portrait and Nan Lilly’s side by side in Sir Lucas’s studio, how she’d rebuffed his attentions twice and humiliated him publicly. What better way to humiliate her in return than to order that dreadful print engraved, printed, and shared among his friends? He might even be the author of the accompanying verse that he’d obviously just repeated in her husband’s hearing.
“Don’t press, March,” Charlotte pleaded. “Can’t you see that he’s too far in his cups to care what he says?”
But March ignored her. “Repeat what you said, Andover,” he ordered curtly. “Repeat it now so all may hear.”
“I cannot, sir,” Lord Andover said, still smirking, and pointedly bowed toward Lady Tewksbury. “The verse will offend the true ladies in the room, since it contains reference to … whores.”
She felt March tense, the muscles in his arm beneath her hand stiffening. She wouldn’t be able to stop him if the madness of his anger made him lunge at Andover, and the scandal that would result would be far, far worse than any name-calling.
“Don’t,” she whispered, all she’d left to say. “Don’t.”
She felt him warring with his temper, struggling to contain it. Then, as gently as he could, he slipped free of her hand and went to stand directly before Andover. When he spoke, his voice was low and unexpectedly measured, and Charlotte realized that his anger had risen to an entirely new and more dangerous level.
“You owe my wife an apology for that, Andover,” he said. “I expect to hear it now.”
But Lord Andover shook his head. “She’s the one who should apologize to me,” he snarled. “The sneaking little whore.”
Instantly March’s fist flew forward to find the fleshy underside of Andover’s jaw, and with a single efficient punch he knocked the marquess to the floor. Women screamed, men swore, and everyone gasped and chattered, but they still heard March as he spoke to Andover, stunned and sprawled on the floor.
“You will offer your apology to my wife by noon tomorrow, Andover,” he said, “else my friends will call on you by one.”
He took Charlotte’s hand and kissed it. He bowed to their shocked hostess, and then with his head high he led Charlotte from the room and the house, and into the greatest scandal in anyone’s memory.
It wasn’t supposed to come to this.
With his hands clasped behind his back, March stood by the window in the long drawing room, staring out at the park without seeing any of it. Behind him sat Charlotte, her eyes red with weeping and her hands clenched in her lap. Brecon, tight-lipped and tense, sat across from her. Tea, coffee, wine, and biscuits were set on the table between them, as if any of them could muster an appetite. There wasn’t any conversation, either, and the only sound in the room was the ticking of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, relentlessly counting the minutes until noon.
It was all his own fault, of course. March knew that. If he hadn’t let himself be ruled by anger, if he hadn’t jumped at Andover’s taunt, if he hadn’t spoken so rashly before so many witnesses, if he hadn’t challenged that smirking scoundrel and demanded an apology for Charlotte …
If, if, if.
Now it was too late, and growing later still with every tick of the clock. Andover wouldn’t present himself here at Marchbourne House, and he wouldn’t apologize, either. Andover never apologized to anyone; it wasn’t his way. He’d nothing to risk in this. No wife, no children, no reputation, and he’d long since gambled away his income and his estates. For Andover all that was left was the excitement he could wring from dangerous situations. A duel was only another part of the game of seducing other men’s wives. For Andover to be able to stake his own wretched, empty life against that of a duke with rank, wealth, and power second only to royalty’s: what greater thrill could there be than that?
It would be the easiest thing in the world for March to withdraw his challenge. He was a duke. He could as much as do what he pleased. In some quarters, he’d be praised for obeying the empty laws against dueling, laws that no other gentlemen ever paid much heed. He might even win the approval of the king, who’d been vocal about how much he hated the practice. Most of all, he’d please Charlotte and spare her from the anguish that, one way or another, she was sure to endure on account of him.
But then it was precisely for her sake that he couldn’t walk away now. She’d been slandered and dishonored by a man with no right to be called a gentleman. March had to defend her. He wanted her to be proud of being his duchess and the mother of his children, and he wanted those children to be proud of him, too. He didn’t want anyone telling Charlotte she’d married into a family bred from bastards, or that she was no better than Nan Lilly simply because she shared his bed.
There was his own honor and name to protect as well. Charlotte was the bravest woman he’d ever known, and he didn’t want it said that her husband was a spineless coward who issued challenges only to back away. If people whispered behind his back now about his family’s background, then they’d do it a hundred times more because he’d only confirmed their worst suspicions. He’d be a gentleman without honor and a disgrace to the peerage. He would, in short, become an outcast.
And Charlotte deserved far better than that. Her
love had been his salvation. The least he could do for her in return was to defend the honor of that love.
He started when the clock began to chime, solemn and slow, twelve times. He waited until it was done before he took a deep breath and turned to face Charlotte and Brecon.
“Very well, then,” he said, forcing himself to smile. “It’s decided. Brecon, you’ll call on Andover on my behalf. Make whatever terms are customary.”
“Andover will choose pistols,” Brecon said, his face grim. “He always does.”
“All the better,” March said. When it came to the duel itself, he felt strangely confident, trusting both to fate and to his own abilities as a marksman. He had fought two other duels before, again over Nan Lilly’s legacy to his family. The first time had been with swords. He’d been nineteen and terrified, yet he’d escaped with only a scar on his arm so insubstantial that Charlotte had never noticed it. The second was by pistols, and again he’d been the victor, with his opponent likely carrying the ball in his thigh to this day. Now, with so much more at stake, he could only pray that his luck held.
“We’ll be using my pistols,” he said, “the French pair, and they’ll be like old friends in my hands.”
Clearly worried, Brecon shook his head. “I’d always rather trust my fate to a blade and skill, especially now that you’ve settled on accepting first blood. Gunpowder’s as likely to misfire as not, and then you’ll—”
“No more!” Charlotte rose abruptly. “Enough of this—this foolishness, March. Guns versus swords! What manner of question is that, when both can only lead to bloodshed? You must stop this now.”
Brecon nodded, though his expression didn’t change. “You have heard all my arguments and those of your good lady as well. You will not be persuaded?”
March sighed. He had heard all the arguments, from Brecon and Charlotte both. There couldn’t possibly be anything left to say.
“I thank you for your concern, Brecon,” he said gravely, “but you know my decision.”
When You Wish Upon a Duke Page 26
