Desperate Duchesses

by Eloisa James

  There was a scratch at the door and Roberta hastily dropped the coat onto the bed. But as the door opened, she didn’t see her maid. In fact, she didn’t see anyone until the door closed again and Teddy appeared around the end of her bed.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said by way of greeting.

  “Gotta apologize, my papa says.”

  “My papa says—appropriately—that I should apologize,” Roberta corrected him.

  He grinned at her. “Brought you—I brought you a present.”

  Roberta summoned up a smile. Of course she ought to be touched by whatever grubby, bent flower he was about to produce from under his coat.

  It wasn’t a flower, but a struggling, spitting kitten. She felt no inclination to take it from him.

  “Perhaps you’d better put it down,” she said after the charming feline gave Teddy another red welt across his hand.

  He dropped it and the kitten landed on its splayed-out feet with a rather pitiful mew of protest and then streaked under the bed.

  “It was much nicer when it was in the shed,” Teddy said, with an edge of apology in his voice. “I thought you might like it. Since you have to sleep alone. Cats are good company.”

  “I like sleeping alone,” Roberta informed him.

  He wandered over. “That’s Papa’s French coat,” he said. “France is in Paris.”

  “Paris is in France,” she said. “You need to retrieve that kitten and take it back to its mother.”

  “It’s yours now. Besides, I wanted to tell you about the gardener, he works in the gardens and—”

  “The gardener works in the gardens,” Roberta said automatically, moving over to pull the cord.

  “His name is Rummer and he used to be a prize-fighter. Rummer used to stroddle his opponents and once he almost spent five guineas for a wife—”

  “For a wife?” Roberta said, rather startled by that. She had seated herself before the dressing table and began brushing out her hair.

  “Yes, indeed. Rummer was at a fair in Smithfield and a man was auctioning his wife, and he wanted five guineas to start, and Rummer thought about it hard, but then he decided that the life of a prize-fighter was no place for a wife because”—Teddy finished triumphantly—“lady’s gowns are pinned so high these days that you can’t see their heads for their tails.” And he broke into a mad fit of giggling, and repeated the head and tail part two or three times for the pure naughty value of it.

  Roberta just kept brushing. It was rather sad to think about the wife auctioned off for five guineas, but when questioned, Teddy didn’t know her fate, only that Rummer hadn’t bought her.

  “That’s two things you need to discover,” Roberta told him. “What happened to the wife, and what a bog-trotting croggie is.”

  “I likes you!” he said, beaming up at her. “I likes you—”

  “Like you,” Roberta said.

  “I like you because you listen to me. Papa says that I’m a gossip who could out-rattle fifty porters.”

  “I agree with him.” Finally there was a knock at the door and she called, “Enter. I didn’t know it was you,” she said rather crossly.

  “Papa, look at this,” Teddy said. “The lady’s new kitten likes your red coat.”

  Sure enough, the kitten had clawed its way up on the bed and was nestled in velvet with silver embroidery.

  “I’m not dressed,” Roberta said with dignity. “I’ll thank you to take your son out of this room—once again—and allow me to continue dressing.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “At this very moment my sister is undoubtedly entertaining at least two gentlemen in her chambers as they aid her in choosing the day’s costume. Why don’t Teddy and I do the honors?”

  Roberta realized she still had her brush in the air and put it down in exasperation. Teddy had picked up the kitten, who actually seemed to be purring.

  “I very much doubt that your sister is allowing gentlemen into her bedchamber while she’s”—Roberta glanced down to make sure that her dressing gown was still tied tightly—“en déshabillé.”

  “But that’s precisely the fashion these days,” he said, taking a chair and swinging it about so that he could sit on it facing her. “It would be a dismal thing indeed for a lady to dress herself. Generally one has a maid or two in the room as well. They throw the clothes on you, while Teddy and I advise you where to place a patch, if you wish one, and face color, and ribbons—that sort of thing.”

  “I do not believe that unmarried ladies invite gentlemen into their rooms while they dress. And I don’t wish to wear a patch!” Roberta said, feeling rather discomposed. She prided herself on her lack of naïveté, but she was beginning to realize that being sophisticated in comparison to Mrs. Grope was nothing in relation to the Reeve family.

  Damon’s eyes were even greener in the sunlight.

  “I think we should go onto the river,” Teddy said. “This kitten would like that.”

  “I doubt it,” his father said. “Roberta likely has important things to do.”

  The river? In truth, Roberta had a singular longing to see more of London. “I have to return to the house by early evening,” she said cautiously.

  “Ah, the great Villiers chess match,” Damon said, rising. “Come on, scrap. Let’s give Roberta some time to put on a gown without our help, and then we can all go on the river. Haven’t you ever been out on a river?”

  Roberta shook her head.

  “On a picnic?”

  Roberta did not feel like explaining her disinclination to picnic with Mrs. Grope, so she just shook her head again.

  “A woman with much to learn,” Damon said, with a wicked smile that spoke of kisses, not picnics. Then he was gone, leaving behind a red velvet coat with small white hairs sprinkled across the front.

  Roberta untied her dressing gown. Perhaps she shouldn’t be going on the river, whatever that signified. Perhaps she should stay at home so that she was definitely here when Villiers arrived.

  But she wasn’t quite certain what she meant to do to or with Villiers in order to make him marry her, although the very thought of him made her heart speed up again. Her maid burst into the room, carrying another of Jemma’s gowns. It was a pale blossom pink, and Roberta forgot all about Villiers as she learned the intricacies of a skirt draped à la polonaise.

  Some two hours later, Viscount St. Albans bowed his way out of Jemma’s room and minced his way down the stairs. He was a slender man who made the very best of himself. This afternoon he was wearing a magnificent suit of lemon-colored iridescent silk, set with enameled buttons. His coat curved away from his waist; he left it entirely open, displaying all twenty buttons on his waistcoat (matching enamel, naturally). The waistcoat was judiciously padded over the chest, which repaired the one small fault he found with his own physique. Well, that and perhaps the fact that his eyes were just a trifle too close together.

  He picked his way down the stairs carefully because there is nothing worse than polished marble when one was wearing high heels, and he judged that height was always desirable. But his mind was racing far ahead of him, already at the coffee house reporting the pleasurable fact that when he announced a previous engagement that meant he must take himself off, though naturally he perfumed the fact with many compliments, Corbin had made no move to leave the duchess’s bedchamber.

  In fact, he had left the two of them in a cozy discussion of some chess player from Poland, a god-forsaken country that did not interest the viscount in the least. He wrinkled his nose at the thought of how they tried to fool him into thinking they were actually talking of chess. Clearly, Corbin and the duchess had bored him to tears in an effort to make him leave, which, frankly, he was more than happy to do.

  Far be it from him to separate two love birds. Although he would do his best to ascertain just how long Corbin and the duchess would stay in unchaperoned harmony.

  He reached the entryway and demanded a mirror. As a footman held the glass for him, he carefully p
laced his Macaroni hat on top of his curls at a jaunty angle. Then he noticed that a rosette was falling from his shoe; ten minutes later he was seated in an elegant little chair while the duke’s own valet sewed the rosette into a better position. After that, of course, he must needs readjust his stockings in private, and finally, he ended up in front of the glass again, rearranging his hat.

  Just when he was about to give up altogether, he heard a brisk clicking of heels and down came Corbin.

  “Still here?” Corbin said, with a cheerful grin that—to the viscount’s mind—signaled far too much cheer for a mere discussion of chess.

  “I suffered the greatest imposition to my shoe,” the viscount said, taking care to lisp slightly in the new fashion. “It is of all things annoying; these rosettes are prone to falling on the wayside, do you not think?”

  “I never wear such things,” Corbin remarked.

  “I see that,” the viscount said, larding his voice with disapproval. “Your waistcoat would look so much better with a small fringe.”

  “Yours would be greatly improved without it,” Corbin said, with such a gentle smile that at first the viscount didn’t take his meaning, and by the time he did—and would have rejoined sharply with a sharp comment about those buttons!—Corbin had slapped on a round hat and taken himself out of the house.

  The viscount huffed and minced his way down the stairs to his waiting carriage. In his mind, there was no question. While the duchess did not seem to be carrying a child, she was clearly carrying a lover. He tittered to himself at his own jest.

  In their wake, a perfumed, powdered and altogether delectable duchess wandered downstairs, leaving her bedchamber, strewn with silks and ribbands, flowers and shoes, to be made presentable for her upcoming chess match with Villiers.

  To her surprise, her husband was just coming in the front door.

  She halted halfway down the stairs, hand on her heart. “Good lord, Beaumont,” she said. “What an odd start to see you here.”

  “I finished the day’s business,” he said, looking up at her.

  Jemma tripped down the last few steps, conscious of being glad that she looked her very best. Which was a sad reflection on the tedium of her life, if she considered such a thing in connection to her husband.

  “Would you like to begin our game?” he said.

  “Of course!”

  “You play Villiers in your chambers,” he said. “I would suppose that mine must do the honors for our game. If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll remove my wig.” And then, when she didn’t move, “You do know the location of my chambers, don’t you?”

  Jemma didn’t glance at the footmen who lined the wall, their faces blank and their ears straining for every word. “I shall endeavor to find my way there.”

  Elijah watched her go back up the stairs. She was wearing a gown light enough to flutter in the breeze. It was indisputably French, designed to make a man break into an instant sweat.

  He couldn’t think of Jemma’s sensual appeal if he meant to win this game. The one thing about his wife that he had never underestimated was her intelligence. In truth, his memories of their early beddings were not that interesting. It was so long ago that he could hardly remember, and everything took place under the covers, and that rarely.

  It wasn’t her fault, exactly, that she was a tedious bedpartner. Obviously, he’d been a poor teacher. But it had meant that his mistress Sarah’s bouncing, erotic pleasure in his company provided a sharp contrast to the wife his father picked out for him when he was a lad of seven.

  He started up the stairs. Would it have turned out differently had Jemma not found him in his chambers in Westminster with Sarah?

  Perhaps.

  And perhaps not.

  Neither of them appeared designed for the narrow straits of matrimony.

  She entered his room a few minutes later, as he was setting out the pieces. “Ah, your grandfather’s chessboard,” she said. “I hadn’t remembered it until now, but of course I played many a game on it during our first year of marriage.”

  “Who did you play with back then?” he asked. He had been so feverishly excited by his burgeoning role in the House that he barely remembered being at home. Not that things were much better now. All day long people had elbowed him, and smirked at him, and asked him what he was still doing in Westminster. Until finally they drove him to come home some four hours earlier than was his usual practice.

  “The second footman was a fairly good partner: remember Jacobs? He had a long face, like a bulldog. I was saddened to hear that he had died.”

  “He died?”

  Jemma nodded. “How gorgeous this chess set is.” Each piece was a delicate marble fantasy of medieval warfare. The paint had long ago worn off, except for faint touches of red, in the fury of the king’s eyes, on the queen’s lower lip, in the bishop’s robe.

  “You think I don’t remember your game,” Elijah said. “I do. I am ready for attack, if you please.” He moved a pawn to King’s Four.

  Jemma smiled and moved her pawn to King’s Three.

  “The pawn is my favorite piece,” Elijah remarked.

  Jemma sat back, their moves ended for the day. “I could have guessed that. So lowly and humble as you are.”

  “A pawn is crafty, versatile, and in pairs, they sometimes prove irresistible.”

  “There’s little flair in a pawn,” Jemma said, picking up her queen to examine her faded robes.

  “Your game is all about flair, as I recall.”

  “That sounds remarkably dismissive.”

  “I didn’t mean it so.”

  “I prefer to think of my strength as being in the area of assault.”

  Elijah watched his wife’s delicate fingers. “What I remember of your game,” he said slowly, “was that you would attack, but in the event of opposition, you would sacrifice. Run. You sometimes lost on that account.”

  Jemma replaced her queen with a little click. “How gratifying to know that you remember the intricacies of my failures.”

  Chapter 15

  Around three in the afternoon

  The Fleet River

  “I told you that the kitten wanted to come,” Teddy said.

  “But I disagreed,” his father said. “And I thought my sentiments constituted a mandate.”

  Roberta watched footmen pack a sturdy basket into a flat-bottomed boat. It was a very pretty boat, with a roof of flowered muslin that rippled in the breeze, little benches for seats and rolled canvas walls that could be lowered from the roof in case of a sudden shower.

  “This is Mr. Cunningham,” Damon said, introducing a serious looking young man who apparently arranged for the boat. “Ransom, this is Lady Roberta St. Giles. Ransom is my brother-in-law’s secretary. We know each other from years of debauchery at Cambridge.”

  “Hardly debauchery,” Mr. Cunningham protested.

  Damon ignored that. “More to the point, Ransom knows every bend of the river, and he has been kind enough to eschew the duke’s company for ours today.”

  Roberta smiled at Mr. Cunningham, and thought that he had lovely dark eyes, and that it was a nice thing to go onto the river with two handsome young men.

  Well, one could say three. Or two and a half.

  The kitten was the only interloper.

  Roberta could see precisely why Teddy was sleeping hither and yon, in beds where he had no call to be. Damon was attempting to be charming to his son, which, while a nice impulse, was the wrong tactic. Of course Teddy ignored talk of sentiments and mandates.

  The fact that Teddy was reasonably entertaining company did not excuse the fact that he was a child, therefore, by definition, a lower species.

  She cut directly into Damon’s courteous discussion of the kitten’s likely distaste for boating. “Perhaps we should see if he likes to swim.”

  Teddy clutched the animal to his breast, his eyes rounding as he reassessed her as a homicidal cat hater.

  “Just to see if he likes it. You
r father can fish him out if he doesn’t.”

  Teddy shook his head.

  “If he’s not a swimming cat,” Roberta said, pausing a little to make clear her opinion of small kittens who professed no skills at swimming, “then he’ll stay in the carriage until he learns to know better.” And without further ado, she plucked the cat from Teddy’s arms and handed it to a footman.

  “Are we going swimming?” Teddy asked, trotting along next to her as she walked down the stone steps to the waiting boat.

  “I certainly hope not,” Damon said, handing her into the boat.

  Roberta settled herself under the awning and they set out. The Fleet River was much smaller than the Thames, no more than a sleek and sinuous little stream, gleaming and sparkling in the sunlight. Mr. Cunningham moved them along by stabbing a large pole in the water and drawing it back out. Every movement caused the water to chatter and boil around the pole, which enchanted Teddy.

  Damon kept himself occupied by ineffectively remonstrating his son for crimes such as getting wet, and Roberta trailed a hand in the water and watched the ripple of the water. Presently a family of ducks joined them.

  “If only we had your kitten now,” Roberta said to Teddy, “we could throw him in and he could catch us a nice fat duck for supper.”

  He shook his head at her. “My kitten, he’s too small.”

  Roberta corrected his grammar, and Teddy allowed as how the kitten would have liked a ride on a duck’s back. “I’m going to catch a fish for his supper!”

  Damon grabbed him back into the boat just in time.

  The backs of large pleasure gardens stretched to the river; it was as if they were in Bath, or another more slumberous place than the great city of London. Just where green turf came to the water’s edge, one could see brown tree roots jumbled at the surface of the water. There was a squeal when Teddy discovered that sleek silver bodies flashed among the roots.