When the Duke Returns Page 14

  Chapter Nineteen

  Revels House

  March 1, 1784

  That afternoon

  Simeon was conscious of savage disappointment: in his father, every time he leafed through sheaves of rejected bills, in himself. He had returned from the Dower House the night before and retreated to the study until numbers swam before his eyes.

  Yet his father wasn’t the heart of his problem. She was. He could fix the house, and pay the bills. He couldn’t fix what happened to him when he was around Isidore. He felt like a hunting animal seeing her, as if even the hairs on the back of his neck knew where she was in the room.

  Finally, at this late date, he understood all the poetry of desire and lust that he had ignored before. Valamksepa used to recite the poetry of Rumi, a poet from 500 years ago; Simeon had exulted because he was free from the embarrassments described by the poet. And yet, Rumi was right: reason was powerless in the face of the lust he felt for Isidore. All he wanted to do was retreat to a bedchamber and—and rut.

  Like an animal.

  Not like a principled, thoughtful human being, like the kind of man he had always believed himself to be.

  Except he was starting to worry about that too.

  Finally he put down his quill and realized exactly what he feared: by marrying Isidore, he would be giving up himself. He would be giving in to violent tempests of emotion. His house would be shaken by screaming fights between his mother and his wife. He would be unable to withstand her, because he lusted after her to the point of being unable to think.

  He felt ill—the kind of sick airy rush in his head that he used to feel when he and his men were being stalked by a tiger.

  Danger…

  His wife was equally worried. Isidore wanted to be a duchess. She had thought so before her husband appeared, and she thought so even more so now that Simeon turned out to be so knee-weakeningly appealing.

  And yet life with him was going to be humiliating.

  She could survive any amount of public embarrassment. He could go about London without a wig, and run through Hyde Park in a nappy. The problem was that he didn’t really like her very much.

  She could see it in the way he fought his attraction to her, in the veiled coolness of his eyes when she described the changes she planned for the house. Simply in the way he looked at her.

  A husband who didn’t like her. It wasn’t what she expected, though she couldn’t say that she ever gave it a thought. Women liked her. Men desired her. She admired some and tolerated most.

  Isidore sat down on one of the few chairs left in the house. She probably merited the scorn she saw in Simeon’s eyes. After all, she wasn’t what he wanted.

  But what could she do? How do you make a man like you? Like? What did husbands like about their wives? A sense of humor, a partnership—

  Partnership. She could help him more.

  She leaped to her feet. He kept asking the butler questions about various bills. If there was one thing Isidore was good at, it was making inquiries.

  “Honeydew, I should like to visit the village,” she said a few minutes later. “If you would have a bath drawn for me, I shall change my clothing.”

  “When would you like the carriage, Your Grace?”

  Isidore looked down at her dusty skirts. “It will take me at least two hours to make myself presentable.”

  It actually took three, but when she climbed into the carriage, she felt fairly certain that she was perfectly attired: duchesslike, yet not too grand. She brought along Lucille and a footman carrying a thick purse. If there was one thing she was not going to do, it was order on credit.

  The village consisted of six or seven establishments: baker, butcher, smithy, pub and a shop that seemed to sell everything from cloth to ceramic pitchers. Plus a church. She hesitated for a moment, thinking that the vicar was undoubtedly important, but what did she have to say to a vicar?

  Two seconds later she was inside the general shop. It was rather dark because the ceiling was hung with a maze of objects. A table was jumbled with fabric, ribbons, buttons, cooking implements, a butter churn.

  “Your Grace,” Lucille whispered, “what on earth are we doing here?”

  Just then a lean-faced man, with such pronounced hollows in his cheeks that they looked like small caves, came forward. He bowed deeply.

  Isidore pulled off her gloves.

  “May I help you?” he asked.

  “Yes, I would like to buy something.”

  His expression didn’t change. “A ribbon?”

  There was something just faintly, faintly insolent in his tone. As if a duchess would only want a pretty ribbon, like a small child, or perhaps as if a duchess could only afford a ribbon.

  “A bolt of woolen cloth,” Isidore said, picking the largest and most useful thing she saw. She needed to buy something large, something that would give the shopkeeper confidence that the Duchy of Cosway was solvent.

  “A bolt of cloth,” he said. “Of course, Your Grace.”

  So he did know who she was. There was an odd sucking sound and the man’s cheeks suddenly popped inward. Then he turned around, plucked up a bolt of russet wool and thumped it down before her. “Will this do? It’s eight shillings a yard. How many yards would you like? I accept only ready money in this shop.”

  Not enough. Not nearly enough. “I’d like more,” Isidore said.

  “More cloth?” He sucked his cheeks in again, with an audible pop. “I have blues, grays, greens, and more russet. How many yards would Your Grace need this morning?”

  He was mocking her. Isidore’s eyes narrowed. “A great deal,” she said, giving him a blindingly cheerful smile. “Probably every yard you have. I do like cloth.”

  “Wool,” he said, “is a universal taste.” He turned around and bawled, “The bolts!”

  Isidore took the purse from her footman. “How many houses are there in the village?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “I’ll have five yards per household.”

  “There are a few huts down by the river.”

  “I shall buy for twenty-seven households, then, which would be 135 yards, if I’m not mistaken.” She opened her purse.

  “Over one thousand shillings,” the storekeeper said, his voice a bit strangled.

  “One thousand and eighty,” Isidore said cheerfully. “Or fifty-four pounds.” She counted them out, then deliberately put a guinea on the counter. “For delivery to each house in the village.” The shopkeeper almost smiled.

  She put down another guinea, and his eyes widened. Another. They formed a small golden pile. Deliberately, she built it into an unsteady mountain.

  There was an audible pop. No one made a sound; even the footman seemed to be holding his breath.

  “There are twenty-seven houses,” she said. “I shall add an extra guinea, so that you might provide some thread and needles to go with the fabrics.”

  “Yes,” the man said, his voice half strangled. “Though there’s no need—”

  “I am the Duchess of Cosway. I always pay for the value of the merchandise I buy, and naturally, for its delivery as well. There is nothing more valuable than your time, Mr….”

  “Mr. Mopser, Your Grace, Harry Mopser.”

  Isidore held out her hand. “Mr. Mopser, it has been our pleasure to frequent your establishment.”

  “Ba, ba—” he said, but finally managed to say, “Yer Grace.”

  She swept from the store, hiding a smile. In the bakery, she ordered twenty-seven meat pies. In the church, having come up with something to say to the vicar after all, she promised a new steeple.

  By the time she reached the smithy, Isidore felt like an ambassadress to a foreign country. The vicar had welcomed the idea of giving each household in the village a measure of wool with great enthusiasm; the baker had confided that she sent up a few pound cakes to Revels House weekly, in memory of the late duke’s mother; Isidore promptly paid for five-years’ worth of pound cakes.

 
; The smithy had a low door and a pungent odor, like sulphur. “There’s nothing to buy here,” Lucille protested.

  “Then we’ll just greet the smith,” Isidore said cheerfully.

  Once inside the smithy, all she could see was a low ceiling, blackened beams, and the dim glow of the fire. Before she could say anything, her footman called, “The Duchess of Cosway.”

  There was a clatter and a man rose from the hearth. He didn’t bow, or even smile. He just put his hands on his hips and stared at her, and it wasn’t a nice look. He had a crooked nose and his eyes looked like the sunken coals of his own fire. “The new duchess, I suppose,” he stated.

  Isidore blinked.

  “A newly minted duchess,” he drawled. “Flanked by a footman, the better to protect you in case a starving villager manages to sling mud in your direction.”

  He had the air of someone of incredible strength and yet he was surprisingly gaunt. Behind her, Lucille made a little sound, as if she were a mouse scurrying away.

  “Do you wish you had some mud to hand?” she asked, meeting his eyes.

  “A duchess who’s not afraid of an insult…how peculiar.”

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” she said, putting out a hand as her footman took a menacing step forward. “No one is as impolite to each other as equals, in my experience.”

  “Do they chide each other with talk of starving children, then? Of fields rotting at the stalk due to bad seed? Of betrayal and coarse unconcern at the hands of those who should take the greatest care?”

  Isidore’s heart was beating fast. This was the heart of the matter. She looked around and saw a three-legged stool, covered with dust. With no hesitation she walked over, sat down, and folded her hands. “Lucille, I’ll thank you and John to wait for me in the carriage. I’ll sit for a moment and talk to Mr….”

  “Pegg,” the smith said. “Silas Pegg.”

  “Oh no, Your Grace,” Lucille moaned, looking toward the door as if it was heaven’s gate itself.

  Isidore fixed her with a duchess stare and a moment later the smithy was empty.

  “You may sit down,” she said.

  He just looked at her.

  “If you wish.”

  “I only sit amongst my equals.” His teeth were very white. “Duchess.”

  Isidore had the distinct impression that she had been deemed lower than an equal. “Please tell me about the children,” she said, “and the fields.”

  He curled his lip.

  “Unless you wish to be counted amongst those who should indicate concern and haven’t bothered,” she pointed out.

  “I heard that the young duke is paying overdue bills,” Mr. Pegg said.

  “Every bill,” Isidore said. “He is paying every bill that the duchy owes.”

  The smith grunted.

  Isidore let the silence grow between them.

  “We need a midwife and an apothecary,” he said after a time. “The bridge over the river is cracked and dangerous, so the post stopped coming to the village.”

  “A midwife?” Isidore said. “Is there a surgeon?”

  “Pasterby, in the next village,” the smith said. “I can’t think of anyone who can afford him.” He turned to the side and plucked a horseshoe from the fire with a pair of tongs. It glowed red and smelled like hell’s own furnace, to Isidore. Then, as if she wasn’t there, the smith placed it precisely on his anvil, picked up a hammer, swung it over his head and brought it down with a precise clanging sound.

  “Is there a school?” Isidore asked, timing herself between swings of the hammer.

  He scoffed. “A school? You must be joking.”

  She waited.

  “Schools are at the behest of the duchy,” he finally said, turning the horseshoe over with long tongs.

  “Was there ever a school?”

  “Not in my lifetime.”

  “What about a midwife?”

  His hammer must have come down slightly askew because the horseshoe suddenly whipped past her cheek and clanged against the wall of the cabin.

  Isidore didn’t turn around, just gazed steadily at the smith. He looked a bit white. He put down his hammer very precisely, picked up a stool, and sat down on it facing her.

  “What happens if a man kills a duchess?” he said. Almost friendly.

  Isidore let her eyes smile, but not her mouth. “Hanging,” she offered.

  He put his hands on his knees. “The old duke chose a neighboring smith to put up the standards on the bridge over the river, after I wouldn’t work for him any longer. The man mixed sand with the iron to save money, thinking to charge the duke twice as much and perhaps end up with his expenses.”

  “Why did he do it at all?”

  “If you didn’t accept the duke’s custom, he’d have you arrested for something. At least, that’s what folks thought.”

  “And yet you’re not in jail,” she said. “How astonishing.”

  “He was like a very small dog: all bark, no bite,” Mr. Pegg said flatly. “After I refused to do any more work for him, he never entered here again, but nothing the worse happened for that. Nothing that—”

  He stopped.

  “What?”

  “No midwife,” he said. “She couldn’t stay because no one could pay her. I’ve done all right because horses always need shoeing, and the baker’s all right too, because people need bread. But almost all the other merchants are gone. People don’t understand how much the great house matters, out here in the country. They stopped paying servants, you know, or paid them only once a year. No one could manage on half wages. The local people couldn’t work there any longer.”

  “So who is working at Revels House now?”

  “The desperate. Honeydew is a good sort, and he’s kept out true criminals.”

  Isidore nodded. “The bridge,” she said. “The wages, the school, the apothecary, the post road. And the midwife?”

  His eyes went blank. “Yes.”

  She looked around the smelly, dusty smithy again. There was a cot against the wall, with a gray blanket cast over it. This was no house. It was just a place to be. And yet it looked as if he lived here.

  “Did your wife lose a baby?” Isidore asked.

  “That depends on how you see it. She kept the baby with her, so I never saw the child.”

  Isidore looked at the dirt floor because there was too much pain in his eyes. But: “So the baby wasn’t born?”

  She didn’t glance up, but his voice continued, rough with that sort of male anger that accompanies pain. “Joan labored for two days. I found the surgeon from the next village, Pasterby, forced him to come. It was too late.” Still not looking, she heard him get up and clump to the wall to fetch the horseshoe.

  He put it down on the anvil and struck it with the hammer, a gentler, quieter blow than earlier. “She might have died, even with a midwife here.” Another thump of the hammer. “But she died alone and in pain, while I was riding over to the next village. And for that—”

  “She knew you were coming,” Isidore said. “That you were trying to help.”

  “For that I pissed on the duke’s marble coffin,” the smith said. He turned to her. “And for that I almost killed his daughter-in-law.”

  Isidore nodded.

  “Aren’t you going to have a hysterical fit and scream your way out of here?”

  “I’m learning so much,” Isidore said. “I’ll send Honeydew to polish the family tomb directly.”

  There was a moment of silence and then he made a strange barking sound. Isidore was trying to blink away an errant tear and didn’t realize what the sound was, until she understood he was laughing. And laughing.

  Isidore rose and brushed off her back of her pelisse. “Mr. Pegg, I need someone to help me.”

  He stopped laughing and looked at her. “I suspect you would not be surprised to hear that I require all duchesses to pay beforehand.”

  “The vicar reports that he has many graves without stones, as people haven’t bee
n able to afford them. I told him that the Duke of Cosway would be righting the cemetery, and making sure that each grave has a proper memorial.”

  He looked at her. “My Joan has a stone.”

  She nodded. “Will you help me make sure that everyone who was not as lucky as Joan gets a stone?”

  “Lucky?” he said. And snorted.

  “Lucky,” she said. “Unlucky in some ways, lucky in others.”

  “Christ,” he muttered. “A philosophical duchess. That’s just what this village needs.”

  “Philosophical and rich,” Isidore said.

  He got to the door before her and pushed it open. “As I said, Your Grace. Just what this village needs.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Revels House

  March 2, 1784

  The next day

  The man from London had bulging eyes that reminded Simeon of a tree frog he’d seen in Morocco. He had on a wine-red velvet waistcoat that must have belonged to a nobleman at some point. It strained over Mr. Merkin’s impressive stomach.

  “Yer Grace,” he said, bowing as much as his stomach would allow.

  “I am very grateful for your assistance with this problem,” Simeon said.

  “Sewers is my business,” Mr. Merkin said. “There’s no one who knows the inside of a sewer better than I do.”

  “It’s not really a sewer,” Simeon said. “My father put in a water-pumping system—”

  “Sewer,” Mr. Merkin said cheerfully. “Just because it don’t work so well doesn’t mean it’s not a sewer. I can smell its perfume, so why doesn’t your butler here show me the place and I’ll do an assessment.”

  Simeon stood up. “I shall accompany you myself. I am curious about the solution.”

  “I can tell you on the hoof,” Mr. Merkin said, taking a generous pinch of snuff as he led the way out of the room. “I’ve seen this over and again. It’s meant to flow, and it ain’t flowing. You could do dirt, but you han’t done dirt.”