An Affair Before Christmas Read online

  “You simply must stay away from him, away, away, away from him!” May screeched many a time. And Charlotte had agreed, of course. May’s ponderous fiancé, Mr. Muddle, had even taken it upon himself to inform Charlotte that a woman’s reputation was her most golden possession. Charlotte had swallowed an angry retort and nodded soberly.

  No one seemed to believe that the Duke of Beaumont had, in fact, made no moves to tarnish her reputation in the slightest.

  All in all, she thought she behaved admirably—except when she actually ended up in the same room with the Duke of Beaumont, of course. As soon as she saw his face, her heart would start to pound. And then she couldn’t help it; she would tell him what she thought of the Gazette’s report of his last speech in Parliament. He would bend his head just so, a bit to the side, and listen so gravely. And he heard her! He really heard her. They…

  They…

  They talked far too much, and she knew it.

  And she knew, even if no one else did, that the duke didn’t have the faintest interest in her as a woman. He never looked at her that way. Charlotte had never been one to fool herself. Her nose was too long and her fortune was too small to allow her to indulge in fantasies of her own beauty. Or her desirability, financial or otherwise.

  “Don’t you see,” she finally snapped at May, “what you’re implying is horribly painful to me. You’re implying that the duke would actually like to—to kiss me. And we both know that dukes simply don’t kiss women who look like me. Not single women, not women with disagreeably small fortunes. Dukes never kiss spinsters!”

  “You’re not that,” May had said.

  “I am. You know I am. I’m an old maid,” Charlotte said, hating the world. “I’m an ape-leader. And a tabby, and all those other horrible words. The truth is that no one wanted me, May, and when you make play as if a duke would actually desire me, you just rub salt into the wound!” Her voice rose in a way that had a dangerous little wobble to it.

  May was never one for physical demonstrations of affection, but she gave her sister a prompt hug and said that if she were a duke, she couldn’t think of a better thing to do than kiss Miss Charlotte Tatlock.

  Charlotte smiled a bit mistily and said, “And May, if you happened to have one of the most beautiful women in the ton waiting for you at home…to wit, Jemma, the Duchess of Beaumont, would you still want to kiss an old maid named Charlotte Tatlock?”

  “Of course!” May said stoutly, but Charlotte knew her point had gone home.

  The duchess, after all, was exquisite from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. Charlotte had actually amused herself one day trying to ascertain the color of the duchess’s hair. She decided it was like an egg yolk. That didn’t sound very complimentary, but Charlotte meant one of the eggs that are delivered straight from the country. And when they crack open in your egg cup, the yolk is a deep rich gold, a kind of burnished brandy color, and yet there’s the shine of good health, a sort of deep, natural beauty that was a year and a day from Charlotte’s drab locks.

  Put the duchess’s hair together with a lush figure and the unmistakable intelligence in her face—“She is,” Charlotte reminded her sister, “the best chess player in all France, or that’s what they say”—and her argument was finished.

  The husband of such a paragon…and Miss Charlotte Tatlock? Never.

  Chapter 20

  August 1

  Poppy didn’t really expect Fletch to visit again, and he didn’t.

  She cried herself to sleep every night for another few weeks, dressing in the morning to look her very best, in case Fletch paid her a call. After all, her mother was still living with him. How could he survive?

  Clearly, he survived. One morning Poppy dismissed her maid before her hair was curled and powdered, put on a dressing gown, curled up next to the window and watched the birds in Jemma’s garden. Starlings hopped from branch to branch, took sudden flight and spilled up into the sky like gravy thrown into the air, settled back down on the branches to chat. She stayed there all day, wondering about starlings’ nests and their conversations.

  It was the kind of question her mother loathed. “Why waste your time?” she would demand whenever Poppy ventured such a question. “Why waste my time?” she would continue, leaving the room.

  Jemma seemed to find it perfectly sensible that Poppy had stopped dressing formally. “I often don’t dress myself until the late afternoon,” she said. Not that she knew anything about starlings.

  “I only know about chess,” she confessed. They both watched for a time. “They seem to be chattering to each other, don’t they?” Jemma asked, rather startled. “I expect they’re friends.”

  “I’ve never had a real friend before you,” Poppy said.

  “A pretty compliment but untrue! There’s a salver stuffed with cards downstairs to attest that you have many friends, and not all of them are merely curious about your current situation. The ladies from your sewing circle for the penitent poor, for instance—”

  “The sewing circle is for indigent mothers,” Poppy said. “The reception of penitent poor meets at Lady Cleland’s house, and we don’t sew. In truth,” she added gloomily, “we just talk about the immorality of prostitutes.”

  “The seamstresses and gossipers have all paid you calls, though most of them have now retreated to the country,” Jemma said. “Every charitable lady in the city has summoned up her courage and crossed my threshold. No! That’s not quite true.”

  “Someone faltered?”

  “Could one picture Lady Langhorne faltering?”

  “No,” Jemma said, picturing that stout and invincible woman.

  “She sent her card from the carriage, because presumably she could not bring herself to enter such a den of iniquity as Beaumont House when the duchess is in residence,” Jemma said. “So tell me no more fibs about your lack of friends.”

  “It’s not that,” Poppy said, feeling weary. “They are friends of a kind. They wouldn’t approve of my lying about in my nightgown all day long.”

  “That’s due to their virtue,” Jemma said. “Having been born with a complete lack of virtue myself, I never worry about the harsh standards the rest of you put to yourselves.”

  “Born with a complete lack of virtue?” Poppy said, laughing a little.

  “The curse of the Reeves,” Jemma said. “That’s my maiden name, you know. We’re a scurrilous lot. I have an uncle who is stark raving mad. And my brother is hardly a model of sober behavior. The duel with Villiers was his fourth, you know. Is there anything I can get you, Poppy?”

  “Books,” Poppy said. “I stupidly forgot my books at home and I have now read every volume on nature in your library.”

  “Nature? You mean about trees and such? I’m surprised there are any.”

  “I prefer to read about animal life,” Poppy said, “though I was in the middle of a very interesting treatise on the nature of air as contained in water, which I left at home.”

  “We definitely don’t have anything like that. How peculiar and interesting of you, Poppy. Why on earth haven’t you sent a footman for your books?”

  “I shall send a list to Lackington’s Bookshop.” Then she added, rather slowly, “I’ve decided to read all the books I never had time to tackle. And I mean to take notes on them, Jemma, though there’s no point to that, as my mother would say. I shall do so for the plea sure of it.”

  “You’ll be buried in three volume sets,” Jemma said, hopping out of her chair. “Do you know, I’ve discovered that women can join the London Chess Club because they forgot to preclude the possibility in their rules? I’m thinking of becoming a member just because everyone thinks that only men can be chess masters.”

  “You must,” Poppy said. “Only men are supposed to become naturalists.”

  “Then you must become a naturalist,” Jemma said. “You must.”

  A month later

  September 1

  “Do you know what your husband is doing?” Jemm
a asked, looking up from the breakfast table.

  “What?” Poppy asked warily. Given that Fletch wasn’t wasting his time visiting his estranged wife, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know his other activities.

  “It says here that he made a lively speech in the House of Lords that was well received by both sides. How odd. Generally one side at least pretends to detest the speech. What do you think of going to Lady Wigstead’s party this evening?”

  “Perhaps,” Poppy said.

  Jemma narrowed her eyes. “I know just what you’re thinking, Poppy, and it won’t do. I’ve given you a decent mourning period, because it’s called for when a marriage expires. It’s September. That’s five months, long enough to recover. I took about that long, and I fancied myself in love with my husband. Though it was no love match, the way you had.”

  “I thought I had,” Poppy corrected her.

  “But there’s something bewitching about waking up next to a man.”

  “You slept together all night?” Poppy asked, startled.

  “We did. Frankly, what we did in that bed was never very interesting, in retrospect. But I used to like waking up when the morning light was just a faint yellow and asking him about what lay ahead of him. I was such an innocent that it’s hard to imagine.”

  “How so?” Poppy asked.

  “I thought that he enjoyed our conversations, that I might make a difference to his day in the House. That he listened to me.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “Of course he did. But he had no real interest in my advice; he listened courteously because courtesy is in his bones and his breeding. Beaumont is one of the most well-bred persons I’ve ever met. The only time I saw him be truly rude was when I discovered him with his mistress.”

  “Dreadful,” Poppy said, shuddering. “Of course Fletch has a mistress by now. But every time I think about it, I feel sick.”

  “I was sick. I was sick in the carriage on the way home. Even now if I think about the way her hair fell over the edge of the desk, I feel a twinge of nausea.”

  “Did you leave for Paris immediately?”

  “No. I was eager for explanations, for excuses, for anything. But along with his other faults, Beaumont is honest. He had told me he would leave his mistress, and apologized for what I’d seen—but then I asked him if he loved her. He hesitated for a moment and declined to answer, but it was too late. And he finally admitted the truth.”

  “He loved his mistress? My mother said that men form those relationships in a purely practical fashion.”

  “Your mother’s axioms should be taken with a grain of salt,” Jemma said. “Sarah was very beautiful. By the time we married, they’d been together, if you can use that term, for three years. He says she’s no longer his mistress now, but I don’t know how their relationship ended. I do know that he had an attachment to her that was far greater than his attachment to me, with our stilted intimacies and my foolish comments in bed.”

  Poppy swallowed. “It sounds as if you and I are in similar marriages.”

  “You saw Fletch flirting with someone,” Jemma corrected her. “Beaumont left my bed, after making love to me, and proceeded to his office, where he made love to Miss Cobbett. There is a world of difference there, Poppy.”

  “Not really,” Poppy said. “You know there isn’t. If Louise hadn’t happened to be my friend, he’d be making love to her on a desk right now. Is that—is that a common place for such activities?” she burst out.

  “No,” Jemma said. Then she grinned. “We shouldn’t be so gloom-filled, Poppy. Not that many marriages survive, for one reason or another. I waited in Paris for three years, thinking that Beaumont would bring me back, but he didn’t. And by the time he finally deigned to pay me a visit, I had discovered some pleasures of my own—if not on a table top.”

  “I see,” Poppy said. “You’re suggesting that Fletch will wait three years before paying me another call?”

  Jemma leaned over and gave her a squeeze, but said nothing.

  “He isn’t going to come, is he?” It was a relief to say it out loud.

  “I’m not sure how parallel our situations are,” Jemma said, “but my guess is that he’s rather surprised he hasn’t encountered you at a party.”

  “He’s going to parties?” Poppy asked.

  Jemma turned back the newspaper and pointed to a column entitled “Taradiddle about the Ton.” Just above Jemma’s pink-tipped finger was a sentence that made Poppy’s heart drop into her slippers.

  The Duke of F—found himself at the du Maurier ball last night without his duchess. The tiddle is that the said duchess may have departed for Venice. The Duke appeared unmoved by the buzz of interest and spent most of the evening in colloquy with Pitt’s lords, who seemed overjoyed to welcome the sprig of fashion to their ranks.

  “How Fletch must hate being called a sprig of fashion,” Poppy said. And: “I’m in Venice?”

  “They always get those things wrong,” Jemma said. “If they’re not sure where you are, they make something up.”

  “I should go to a meeting of Lady Cleland’s sewing circle,” Poppy said, after a bit.

  “I wouldn’t,” Jemma said.

  “Why not?”

  “It sounds boring.”

  “It’s our duty,” Poppy said. “Caring for the poor and succouring the afflicted.”

  “I don’t do it well,” Jemma said. “I do give a great deal of money away. Beaumont’s money, but believe me, an impoverished person far prefers the solid clink of coin to a poorly stitched sheet, which is about all that I can sew.”

  “I was wondering about money…What am I to do about money?”

  “What do you mean? Fletcher certainly has plenty of money. I’ve never heard otherwise.”

  “But I don’t have any,” Poppy said. “I haven’t even tuppence.”

  “Don’t you have an allowance?”

  Poppy shook her head. “Fletch offered one, but Mother said that I should simply send him all my bills and leave the financial details to him. She gave me lots of advice about how I should react if he questioned my bills, but Fletch has never said a word, not even when I bought two hats—and they were scandalously expensive—in the same month.”

  “Why did your mother believe you shouldn’t have an allowance?”

  “I don’t know.” But she did know. “She thinks I’m not intelligent enough to handle money,” Poppy said, controlling her voice. “She doesn’t say it cruelly, but she believes that very few women handle money well.”

  “She says that to you, the woman immersed in studies of water and air and starlings? And are you saying that you haven’t bought a thing in the years you’ve been married without thinking about your husband’s reaction?”

  “Yes.”

  “And before that, I suppose your mother—”

  “Of course,” Poppy said, feeling like the fool she was. “I shall stay with you through Christmas, Jemma, but then I want to set up my own establishment. And I intend to travel a great deal.”

  Jemma raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess…to the wild African plains?”

  Poppy grinned. “Actually, I was thinking of the Nile River to start.”

  “The Nile will only be comfortable if you are veritably swimming in money,” Jemma said firmly. “I assume that your husband banks at Hoare’s Bank, along with every other sprig of fashion in the capital?”

  “You mustn’t call him that. He would hate it so!”

  “But he is a sprig,” Jemma said. “For one thing, he’s so young.”

  “He’s older than I am.”

  “But younger than I, and worse, he makes me feel old with that little beard of his, and the way he slouches through a room, burning with something or other.”

  “It is tiresome, isn’t it?” Poppy said, starting to laugh.

  “And he’s tediously beautiful,” Jemma said. “Tediously so.”

  “Yes!”

  “It’s not manly to be so perfect in every way.”
>
  Poppy was laughing delightedly.

  “What you need,” Jemma said, “is to withdraw a great deal of money and spend it however you like, without thinking twice about whether you’re buying two hats or forty hats. And then we’ll send Fletch a letter and tell him that you’d like your allowance deposited into your own account at Hoare’s Bank. It will be much easier for both of you that way. You can set up your own house hold, and travel wherever you like, and he won’t have to worry about it.”

  It was all delightfully simple.

  Faced with the smiling, confident faces of the Duchesses of Beaumont and Fletcher, Mr. Pisner of Hoare’s Bank handed over the truly outrageous sum the duchess demanded without a quibble. “After all,” he told his manager, Mr. Fiddler, later, “I knew who she was and it was her.” That wasn’t grammatical, but it was clear enough. “And it were the Duchess of Beaumont as well, and the two of them as thick as thieves, you could tell. And then she told me, the Duchess of Fletcher that is, that she would like her own account at the bank, and that her husband will be depositing her allowance there.”

  “The world is going to hell in a handbasket,” Mr. Fiddler observed. “Not a man has control of his wife anymore. I mean, if a duke doesn’t, what’s the hope for us?”

  Since Mr. Pisner privately thought that he would rather drink poison than be married to Mrs. Fiddler, there wasn’t much else to be said about it, so they went back to adding up last month’s receipts.

  Out in the carriage, Poppy looked disbelievingly at the thick sheaf of banknotes in her hand. “Jemma,” she said, “Fletch is going to be furious.”

  “Really?” Jemma said, powdering her nose in a small glass she took from her bag. “Shall we go back tomorrow and get some more?”

  Poppy thought about that.

  “Why will he be furious? He doesn’t look stingy.”

  “He’s not,” Poppy said.

  “Likely he won’t even notice.”

  Poppy doubted that. But what did she know? She was slowly coming to understand that she knew almost nothing about her husband.