Desperate Duchesses

by Eloisa James

  “As a matter of fact, I am rejoining my family in the ballroom.”

  His eyes skittered over the plain laced front of her gown, with its misshapen pleats that looked as if she had fashioned them herself.

  He dropped his hand. “That makes you altogether more delectable and forbidden fare, an impoverished noble-woman. I would have you without delay if you had but a few pennies to your name, my dear, but even I have a few paltry morals. Foibles, really.”

  “You assume a great deal,” she said. She meant that he was assuming she was poor, although the supposition was fair enough, given her clothing. But he jumped to the more obvious meaning.

  “’Tis true you might not have me. Though I’ll tell you the secret to my success with women, and I won’t charge you ha’pence since you haven’t an extra one to your purse.”

  She waited, cataloging the sheen of his coat and the rumpled perfection of his hair.

  “I don’t really give a damn whether I have you or not.”

  “You shan’t have me,” she said, stung. “Because I feel precisely the same way about you.”

  “In that case, I will kiss your fingertips and retire.”

  As he made a leg before her, she watched the skirts of his coat fall into perfect pleats. Not for nothing was she a wordsmith’s daughter. Pale green wasn’t descriptive enough; the silk taffeta of his coat was celadon, the green of new leaves. And its black embroidery, on close inspection, was mulberry-colored.

  It was an exquisite combination. Enough to change her mind entirely. What she felt was entirely too deep for a flimsy emotion such as lust.

  What she felt wasn’t lust—it was love. For the first time in her life…she was in love.

  In love!

  “I’m going to London,” she told her father once they were home again. “My heart is in chains and I must follow its call.” Though such extravagant language was definitely not Roberta’s chosen mode of expression, she felt that quoting one of her father’s poems was a sound precaution.

  “You most certainly are not!” he said, ignoring her literary reference. “I will—”

  “Without you,” she said. “And without Mrs. Grope.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  They battled on for a month or so until the March edition of Rambler’s Magazine arrived in the post.

  These etchings were no more accurate than those of two years earlier. She was humped-backed and fiercely browed, on her knees before a man in livery, presumably praying for the footman’s hand in marriage. “Like father, like daughter,” the inscription read. “We always suspected that desperation was hereditary.”

  Roberta had no doubt that the image was selling briskly in Humphrey’s Print Shop.

  “My conscience is clear!” her father bellowed, once he understood the reference. “Surely you could have guessed that servants are in the pay of gossip rags? How could you not, given the fact that Mrs. Grope and myself make such frequent appearances in Town and Country? Someone made a pretty penny from your folly. It’s no good begging me to write another poem; the powers of my literature would be of no avail.”

  The marquess’s rage was assuaged only after writing four hundred lines of iambic pentameter rhyming “serpent’s tooth” and “daughter,” which is no easy feat.

  His daughter’s distress was diminished only by repeating to herself that she was going to marry the Duke of Villiers, order clothes of celadon silk and never listen to another poem again in her life.

  She commandeered her father’s second-best coach and the second housemaid to accompany her to London and left, clutching a valise filled with Mrs. Parthnell’s unsightly clothing, a measured sum of money and a poem from her father, which was the only introduction he would vouchsafe her.

  “Oh, brave new world!” she whispered to herself. And then wrinkled her nose. No more poetry. The Duke of Villiers had likely never heard of John Donne and probably couldn’t tell a roundelay from a rickshaw.

  He was perfect.

  Chapter 1

  April 10, 1783

  Beaumont House, Kensington

  “In Paris, a married lady must have a lover or she is an unknown. And she may be pardoned two.” The door to the drawing room swung open, but the young woman sitting with her back to the door took no notice.

  “Two?” an exquisitely dressed young man remarked. “I gather that Frenchmen are a happy race of men. They seemed so petulant to me when I was last there. It must be the embarrassment of riches, like having three custards after supper.”

  “Three lovers are considered rather too many,” the woman replied. “Although I have known some who considered three to be a privilege rather than an abundance.” Her low laugh was a type that tickled a man’s breastbone and even lower. It said volumes about her personal abilities to manage one—or three—Frenchmen with aplomb.

  Her husband closed the door behind him and stepped into the room.

  The young man glanced up and came to his feet, bowing without extraordinary haste. “Your Grace.”

  “Lord Corbin,” the Duke of Beaumont replied, bowing. Corbin was just to Jemma’s taste: elegant, assured and far more intelligent than he admitted. In fact, he would make a good man in parliament, not that Corbin would lower himself to something approaching work.

  His brother-in-law, the Earl of Gryffyn, rose and made him a casual bow.

  “Your servant, Gryffyn,” the duke said, making a leg.

  “Do join us, Beaumont,” his wife said, looking up at him with an expression of the utmost friendliness. “It’s a pleasure to see you. Is the House of Lords not meeting today?” That was part and parcel with the war they had waged for the last eight years: conversation embroidered with delicate barbs, rarely with coarse emotion.

  “It is in session, but I thought to spend some time with you. After all, you have barely returned from Paris.” The duke bared his teeth in an approximation of a smile.

  “I miss it already,” Jemma said, with a lavish sigh. “It’s marvelous that you’re here, darling,” she said, leaning forward a bit and tapping him on the hand with her fan. “I’m just waiting for Harriet, the Duchess of Berrow, to arrive. And then we shall make a decision about the centerpiece for tomorrow’s fête.”

  “Fowle tells me that we are holding a ball.” The duke—who thought of himself as Elijah, though he would be very affronted were any person to address him so—kept his voice even. Those years of parliamentary debate were going to prove useful, now that Jemma had returned to London. ’Twas the reason he’d stayed home for the day, if truth be told. He had to strike a bargain with his wife that would curb her activities to an acceptable level. And he wouldn’t get there by losing his temper; he remembered their newlywed battles well enough.

  “Dear me, don’t tell me that I forgot to inform you! I know it’s a bit mad, but the plans gave me something to do on the voyage here.”

  She looked genuinely repentant, and indeed, for all Elijah knew, she was. The game of marriage they played required strictly friendly manners in public. Not that they were ever in private.

  “He just did tell you that,” her brother put in. “You’d better watch out, Sis. You’re not used to sharing a household.”

  “It was truly ill-mannered of me,” she said, leaping to her feet, which made her silk petticoats swirl around her narrow ankles. She was dressed in a pale blue gown à la française, embroidered all over with forget-me-nots. Her bodice caressed every curve of her breasts and narrow waist before the skirts billowed over her panniers.

  By all rights, the way her side hoops concealed the swell of her hips should be distasteful to a man, and yet Elijah had to admit that they played an irresistible part in a man’s imagination, leading the eye from the curve of a breast to the narrow waist, and then driving him perforce to imagine slender limbs and—and the rest of it.

  Jemma held out her hand; Elijah paused for a moment and then took it. She smiled at him, as a mother might smile at a little boy reluctant to wash his face. “I a
m so glad that you are able to join us this morning, Beaumont. While I trust that these gentlemen have impeccable opinions”—she cast a glimmering smile at Corbin—“one’s husband’s opinion must, of course, prevail. I do declare that it’s been so long since I felt as if I had a husband that it is quite a novelty! I shall probably bore you to tears asking you to approve my ribbons.”

  In the old days, the first days of their marriage, Elijah would have bristled. But he was seasoned by years of dedicated jousting in Parliament where the stakes were more important than ribbons and trifles. “I am quite certain that Corbin can do my duty with your ribbons.” He said it with just the right amount of disinterest and courtesy in his voice.

  From the corner of his eye, Elijah noticed that Corbin didn’t even blink at the idea he had just been invited by a duke to do his husbandly duty. Perhaps the man could keep Jemma occupied enough that she wouldn’t cause too many scandals before parliament went into recess. He turned sharply toward the door, annoyed to discover that his wife’s beauty seemed more potent in his own house than it had been in Paris during his rare visits.

  Partly it was because Jemma had not powdered her hair. She knew quite well that the shimmer of weathered gold was far more enticing than powder, and contrasted better with her blue eyes. It was only—he told himself—because she was his wife that he felt this prickling irritation at her beauty. Or perhaps the irritation was caused by her self-possession. When they first married, she wasn’t so flawless. Now everything about her was polished to perfection, from the color of her lip to the witty edge of her comments.

  Those blue eyes of hers widened just slightly, and she cast him another of her glimmering smiles. “We really are two hearts that beat as one, Beaumont,” she said.

  “In that case,” her brother said, “it is truly odd that you have spent so much time apart. Not to break up this touching example at marital felicity—so rare in our depraved age and, I think we’ll all agree, an inspiration to us all—but can you just show us the damned centerpiece now, Jemma? I’ve got an appointment on Bond Street, and your friend the duchess doesn’t seem to be making an appearance.”

  “It’s in the next room, if Caro has everything prepared. She wasn’t quite ready when you arrived.”

  Elijah caught himself before asking who Caro was.

  Jemma was still speaking. “I trust her with everything. She has the most elegant eye of any female I’ve ever known. Except, perhaps, Her Majesty, Queen Marie Antoinette.”

  Elijah shot his wife a look that showed exactly what he felt about those who boasted of intimacy with French royalty. “Shall we examine this centerpiece, sirs?” he said, turning to Corbin and Gryffyn. “The duchess is considered quite a leader of fashion in Paris. I myself shall never forget her masquerade ball of ’79.”

  “Were you there?” Jemma asked wonderingly. “I vow, I had quite forgotten.” She tapped him on the arm with her fan. “Now it comes back to me. All the men were dressed as satyrs—’twas most ravishingly amusing—but you wore black and white, for all the world like a parliamentary penguin.”

  He dropped her hand, so that he could bow again. “Alas, I do not show to best advantage with a satyr’s tail.” And neither did the asses of Frenchmen, though he didn’t say it aloud.

  She sighed. “Both members of my family declined to join the fun. So English—so pompous—so—”

  “So clothed,” Gryffyn said. “There were some knees in evidence that night that should never have seen the light of day. I still have trouble forgetting Le Comte d’Auvergne’s bony knobs.”

  Jemma peeked through the doors to the ballroom beyond. Then she laughed and flung them open. “How wonderful it all looks, Caro! You are brilliant, absolutely brilliant, as always!”

  Corbin was briskly following in Jemma’s train, so Elijah grabbed his brother-in-law’s elbow. “Who the hell is Caro?”

  “Pestilently intelligent woman,” Gryffyn said. “Jemma’s secretary. She’s been around for four or five years. You haven’t encountered her?”

  And, at Elijah’s shrug, “She prepares Jemma’s most extravagant escapades. Accomplices in scandal, that’s the way to describe them. Prepare to be dazzled by her incomparable abilities, not that you’ll appreciate them. I don’t suppose that you’re secretly hoping that Jemma will transform into a political wife, are you?”

  “My hope is limited to a wish that she doesn’t topple my career,” Elijah said. “Do I understand you to say that all of Jemma’s secretary’s abilities are directed to the creation of scandal?”

  “As I said, you won’t like it,” Gryffyn said. They were at the door. He pulled it farther open and moved to the side. “This is pretty standard for her.”

  Elijah walked through the door and stopped short.

  “Bloody hell,” he breathed.

  “It’s better than those satyrs. No tail,” Gryffyn pointed out.

  As Elijah stared into the room, he felt his hard-won calm and control slipping from his grasp. The huge mahogany table that generally stood in the dining room had been removed to the middle of the ballroom. Rather than dishes, it held an enormous pink shell, apparently made of clay. Rosebuds were strewn all about, falling in chains to the floor. Numbly he noticed that Jemma was exclaiming over how realistic the flowers appeared. “And the sea shells!” she squealed. “A beautiful touch, Caro!”

  But that wasn’t it, of course.

  What was making his heart thud against the wall of his chest wasn’t the hundreds of pounds worth of fabric flowers, nor the shell, nor even the pearls, because there were also strings and strings of pearls. God knows, he had more than enough money for whatever extravagances Jemma came up with. What Elijah treasured more than anything else in the world was his stock of carefully nourished, tenderly used, political power.

  He had nurtured it day by day. Built up a solid reputation for energetic, thoughtful argument. While his wife lived in Paris for the last eight years, he built a career without the help that other men got from their wives throwing dinner parties, or hosting salons. He’d come to the top of the House of Lords, to one of the most respected positions in the kingdom, by marshalling his intellect, never taking a bribe. Separating himself from the corrupt policies and wild scandals that plagued Fox and the Prince of Wales’s disgraceful cronies.

  And now, when he might have only a little time left to further his work—

  The centerpiece wasn’t wearing a damned scrap of clothing.

  And she was painted gold; never mind the pearls that were glued around her body at regular intervals.

  His brother-in-law was watching her with a calculated, lustful look in his eye that Elijah despised, though he had to admit that only a dead man would ignore this centerpiece.

  “At least she’s not wearing a tail,” Gryffyn commented.

  At that very moment, the naked, gold-painted young lady bent sideways and fiddled with the little stand on which she was leaning. A huge spray of gorgeous peacock feathers burst from behind her beautifully curved rear.

  “Spoke too soon,” Gryffyn said happily.

  “Damn it to hell,” Elijah breathed.

  Chapter 2

  Roberta entered the room just as the peacock tail sprang into view. About to announce her presence, the butler froze, mouth open. She patted his arm. “I’ll announce myself,” she told him. “My cousin is expecting me.”

  He nodded and backed out of the room.

  That was a stroke of luck, given that her cousin was not expecting her. In truth, the Duchess of Beaumont likely didn’t even know she existed.

  The duchess was much more beautiful than the sketches Roberta had seen in Town and Country Magazine. Her hair was tumbled into a sophisticated mass of curls, and her clothes were exquisite. In fact, she looked rather like portraits of Roberta’s mother, with perfectly balanced features and deep crimson lips. But of course the duchess had a potent combination of elegance and sensual appeal that Roberta doubted her mother, buried deep in the country with a hu
sband whom the charitable labeled eccentric, had ever possessed.

  Roberta walked forward, but no one noticed her. There were two gentlemen standing by the table, gawking up at the naked woman. One had to suppose she was used to the attention, because she was smiling at them most genially. In fact, she reminded Roberta of nothing so much as a toothy crocodile, if crocodiles were endowed with large, fleshy bosoms.

  The only gentleman not staring at the goddess was glowering at the duchess. He had to be the duke. Beaumont was often illustrated holding the reins of government or whipping members of the House. He looked powerful, with a sort of furious elegance.

  “One of the points I should like to make,” he said with icy forcefulness, “is that this preposterously tailed young woman may well destroy my career. She will undoubtedly create an interesting evening, but have you given a thought to proprieties? I count among my important acquaintances a good many people with young, unmarried daughters. After one peek at this spectacle, they will never darken the door of my house again!”

  The duchess seemed unmoved. “I assure you that no one in Lords will be other than amused by my centerpiece, Beaumont. My absence has had no effect on your ability to garner support, and neither will my presence.”

  “Apparently your years in Paris have had no effect on your intelligence,” the duke snarled. Roberta took a tentative step backward. She wanted no part in a marital quarrel.

  “Apparently your manners declined in the same period; what a pity.”

  “He’s right, Jemma. You’re being naïve,” another gentleman said, tearing his eyes away from the naked centerpiece. He looked so much like the duchess that he must be her brother, Lord Gryffyn, and therefore Roberta’s cousin (once, or twice, or—if one is punctilious—twelve times removed). The eyebrows were darker, but his carelessly tied-back hair was the color of brandy. They had the same cherry mouth, though he had none of his sister’s flawless perfection. His coat was a nice steel blue, but looked as if he pulled it on without thinking, as his waistcoat was an odd orange.