Duchess by Night Read online

  “Apparently queens don’t wear much clothing, so you’ll definitely be more comfortable this way. And I’m sorry about not warning you, darling, but it’s so much fun doing it last minute. You should see people rushing about the house looking for costumes. The butler is going mad! It’s wonderful.”

  And with that, Jemma sailed out of the room leaving Harriet with the goose.

  It was absurd to feel so sorry for herself. Every time she walked into Judge Truder’s court she heard of people whose lives were far more desperate. Why just last month there was a girl who stole half a jar of mustard and six oranges. Truder had actually woken up and wanted to give the poor child hard labor, fool that he was.

  But she, Harriet, had no need to steal oranges. She was a duchess; she was still relatively young; she was healthy…

  She was lonely.

  A tear splashed on the duck and she absently smoothed his feathers.

  She didn’t really want to be a queen, either of fairies or Palmyra, wherever that was. She just wanted a husband.

  Someone to sit with her of an evening, just like Loveday said.

  Chapter Two

  Another chapter in Which Breasts Play a Not-insignificant Role

  Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, threw back her head and laughed. Her bodice gaped, precariously clinging to the slope of her breasts. The dapper man before her twirled on his toes, one hand up in the air, like a gypsy dancer at Bartholomew Fair. Zenobia laughed again, and flung both hands in the air in imitation of him.

  The Queen of Palmyra’s corset, if one existed, was thoroughly inadequate.

  It crossed Harriet’s mind that a true friend would alert Zenobia—more commonly known as Isidore—that her breasts were about to make an appearance on the ballroom floor.

  But Harriet was tucked in a chair at the side of the ballroom, and Isidore had her eyes fixed on the man she was seducing, though seducing wasn’t quite the appropriate word. Harriet had the idea that Isidore was chaste. Just bored. And Harriet couldn’t possibly catch her attention. She felt invisible; she certainly seemed to be invisible to most of the men in the room.

  Widows dressed as Mother Goose were not as much in demand as half-naked queens, no matter how much stuffing their bodices contained. What little cloth existed in Isidore’s bodice was thickly embroidered with peacock feathers, the eyes picked out in jewels.

  In short, peacock eyes were more popular than goose eyes. Lord Beesby, for example, didn’t seem to be able to take his eyes off of Isidore’s bodice, whereas Harriet’s goose put men off. It was lying beside her, head drooping off the chair so that its beady eyes stared at the floor.

  Isidore twirled again, hands in the air. A lock of hair fell from her elaborate arrangement. The dancers nearby paused in their own steps, entranced by the sway of her hips. There was something so un-English about Isidore’s curves, her scarlet lips, the way she was smiling at Beesby as if he were the king himself. It had to be her Italian ancestry. Most Englishwomen looked—and felt—like Harriet herself: dumpy. Maternal.

  Though she, Harriet, had no reason to feel maternal, given her lack of children. At this point, the only man likely to approach her would be called Georgie Porgie.

  Harriet bit her lip. She’d welcome Georgie Porgie. Who knew it was just as humiliating to sit out dances when one is widowed, as when one first entered the marriage market? Yet another one of life’s charming surprises.

  Lord Beesby was dancing as he had never danced before. One hand still in the air like a gypsy king, he capered and pranced before his partner, his knees rising higher and higher. He reminded Harriet of nothing so much as her beloved spaniel, Mrs. Custard. If Beesby had a tail, he’d be wagging it with pure bliss. He was rapt, enchanted, in love. According to the pattern of the dance, he should have long ago moved to another partner, but he and Isidore had—scandalously—eschewed exchanging partners, and the dance had continued without them.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Harriet caught a glimpse of an irate-looking Lady Beesby making her way toward the couple. Isidore’s bodice was at the very point of disaster. Harriet jumped to her feet, caught Isidore’s eye, and jerked her head in the direction of Lady Beesby.

  Isidore flashed one look at the matron heading toward her, drew back, and shouted, “Lord Beesby, you do me wrong!”

  Caught in a dream, Lord Beesby didn’t hear and circled blissfully, one more time.

  Isidore bellowed something else; Lord Beesby started blinking and stopped short in the midst of a turn. Isidore’s hand flashed out and she slapped him.

  The entire ballroom went stone silent. “You led me to believe that you found me attractive!” Isidore shrieked, with all the bravado of an Italian opera singer. “How dare you spurn me after presenting me with such temptation!”

  Jemma appeared from nowhere and wrapped an arm around Isidore’s waist. “Alas, Lord Beesby is a man of high moral fiber,” she said, with magnificent emphasis.

  “Oh, how shall I recover!” Isidore cried, casting a drooping hand to her brow.

  Jemma swept her off the dance floor. Harriet barely stopped herself from applauding.

  Lord Beesby was still standing there, mouth agape, when his wife reached his side. Harriet thought she looked at him with a measure of new respect. It was one thing to have one’s husband making a fool of himself on the dance floor with a gorgeous young woman. It was another to have that same husband spurn the wench in a public arena.

  Lady Beesby even smiled at her husband, which had to be the first such affectionate gesture in days. Perhaps years. Then she spun on her heel and marched off the dance floor, her smaller, bemused husband trailing after her. It reminded Harriet of when her fat sow Rebecca would suddenly march off in indignation. Rebecca generally trailed at least one piglet behind her. Or—Harriet stopped.

  Her thoughts were made up of spaniels and piglets. She was so tedious that she bored herself. She was countrified, tedious, and melancholic.

  She could feel her eyes getting dangerously hot. But she was tired of tears. Benjamin had died over two years ago. She’d wept when he died, and after. Wept more than she thought it was possible for a human body to cry. Wept, she realized now, from a mixture of grief and rage and mortification.

  But her husband was gone, and she was still here.

  Dressing in Mother Goose costumes wouldn’t bring him back. Sitting like a mouse at the side of the ballroom wouldn’t bring him back. Nothing would bring him back.

  Yet what could she do? Widows were supposed to be dignified. Not only that, but she was a duchess. Given that Benjamin’s nephew, the current Duke of Berrow, was only eleven years old and still at Eton, she wasn’t even a dowager duchess. She was a duchess and a widow and a twenty-seven-year-old woman: and which of those three terms was the most depressing she couldn’t even decide.

  She swallowed hard. Could she bear to spend the rest of her life growing paler, as her hair faded and her shoulders stooped? Would she merely watch other women seduce and entice, while she mused about fat piglets and loyal spaniels? A dog, no matter how loyal, is only a dog.

  She couldn’t spend the rest of her life clinging to the sides of ballrooms, dressed as the mother she wasn’t and never would be.

  She had to do something. Change her life! Start thinking about—

  About—

  Pleasure.

  The word popped into her mind unexpectedly and stayed there, with all the gracious coolness of a drop of cool rain on a blistering day. Isidore was obviously enjoying herself, flirting with Beesby. He loved their dance.

  Pleasure.

  She could think about pleasure.

  Her pleasure.

  Chapter Three

  In Which the Geography of Pleasure is Dissected

  Harriet found the Duchess of Beaumont and the Duchess of Cosway—i.e, Jemma and Isidore—in a small parlor after a dismaying search of other rooms. Every alcove held a pair of heads, male and female. Every settee featured people paired off like robins in
spring. Or, since it was a costume party, like a sailor and the Queen of Sheba.

  She pasted a cheery Mother Goose type of smile on her face and kept saying mindless things like “Oh, very sorry! Right then, I’ll just—just move along, shall I?” The sailor didn’t even look up when she walked into the yellow salon. His head bent over the Queen of Sheba’s with such tenderness and possession that Harriet felt as if her heart would break in two.

  She and Benjamin never…of course not. They had been a married couple, hadn’t they? Married couples didn’t kiss at balls.

  But had Benjamin ever kissed her like that? He used to kiss her in a brisk, affectionate manner. The way she kissed her spaniel.

  “You saved me!” Isidore cried when Harriet finally located Jemma and Isidore in a small sitting room. “Lady Beesby would have eaten me for breakfast.”

  “Darling, come and sit beside me; I’m feeling blue,” Jemma said, peering around the side of her chair. They were seated around the fire.

  Harriet rounded the little circle and halted. Her least favorite acquaintance in the world, the Duke of Villiers, lay on a settee just to the left of the hearth. He was recovering from an infection caused by a dueling wound, and his face was angular and pale. Even so, one look at him made her feel every inch an unattractive, dumpy widow. His dressing gown was made of Italian silk, dark lavender embroidered with a delicate border of black tulips. It was exquisite, unexpected, and utterly beautiful.

  “I apologize, Your Grace,” she said. “I didn’t realize you had left your chambers.”

  “I was threatening to rise to my feet and dance the sara-band,” he said, in his slightly drawling accent, “so my dragonish valet finally allowed me to be near the festivities, if not part of them.”

  Harriet sat down stiffly, promising herself that she could leave within five minutes. She could plead a headache, she could say the fire was too hot for her, she could say that she had promised to meet someone in the ballroom…Anything to get away from Villiers.

  “As you entered, Harriet,” Isidore announced, “I was just saying that I have decided to create a scandal.”

  “Poor Lady Beesby,” Harriet said.

  Isidore laughed. “Not with Beesby. That was just entertainment. No, I mean to create a true scandal. The kind of scandal that will force my husband to return to England.” Harriet suddenly noticed that Isidore had a very firm jaw.

  “I hate to use my misbegotten history as an example,” Jemma said, “but my husband never found my scandals an adequate reason to travel from England to France. And your husband is somewhere in the Far East, isn’t he?”

  Harriet silently agreed. Propping up a drunken judge had caused her to see any number of cases involving scandals caused by women. Often their husbands didn’t bother to travel to the next county to rescue them. But then, dukes and duchesses never showed up in the shire court of the Berrow duchy and presumably the duke cared for his reputation.

  “I pity Cosway,” Villiers said languidly. “Jemma, have you a chess set in this parlor?”

  She shook her head. “No. And you know that the doctor told you to stay away from chess. You need to recover from those fevers, not exacerbate your tired brain by thinking up intricate plays.”

  “Life without chess is paltry,” Villiers growled. “Not worth living.”

  “Benjamin would have agreed with you,” Harriet said, before she thought. Her husband had killed himself after losing a game of chess.

  To Villiers.

  There was a drop of silence in the room, a moment in which no one breathed. Then Jemma said, “We all wish Benjamin were here to play chess with us.”

  Villiers turned his face to the fire and said nothing, but Harriet felt a rush of acute shame, along with the memory of his stammering apology. Villiers had been dying, literally burning up with a fever, and he’d come all the way to Jemma’s house just to apologize to her for winning the game that led to Benjamin’s suicide.

  “I wasn’t referring to his—his death,” Harriet scrambled into words. “Merely that, if a doctor had told Benjamin that he couldn’t play chess—”

  “For a whole month,” Villiers put in.

  “Poor Benjamin would have been enraged. Crazed.”

  “I would be rather crazed myself, I think,” Jemma said.

  “That tyrannical Scottish surgeon of yours could at least allow us to continue our match,” Villiers growled. “One move a day…how difficult could that be for my festering brain to handle?”

  “You truly can’t play chess for a month?” Harriet asked.

  “It’s not so terrible,” Jemma said. “You can read books. Though not books about chess, of course.”

  “A month,” Villiers said.

  There was a world of leaden boredom and misery in his voice, so much so that Harriet couldn’t help smiling. “You’ll have to find other interests.”

  “Women, wine, and song,” Isidore suggested. “Classic male occupations.”

  “I can’t sing.”

  “Beautiful women, preferably mermaids, are supposed to sing while you quaff wine,” Harriet pointed out, rather liking the image of the Duke of Villiers surrounded by sirens. If she were a siren, she would try to sink his vessel.

  “If you know of any mermaids, do send them my direction,” Villiers said, closing his eyes. “Right now I am far too tired to pursue a woman, fish tail or no.”

  He did look white. Given that Harriet loathed him, she was feeling provokingly sympathetic.

  “I know! I can use you in my scheme,” Isidore exclaimed.

  “No.” Villiers stated, not opening his eyes. “I never join schemes.”

  “A pity,” Isidore said. “I am quite sure that the news that his duchess was frolicking with the infamous Duke of Villiers would summon my ne’er-do-well husband. Cosway’s solicitor last indicated that he was somewhere in Ethiopia. Apparently he’s discovered the source of the Blue Nile. And aren’t we all happy for him?”

  “But if the duke returns to defend your reputation, poor Villiers would have to fight another duel,” Jemma said. “Your husband probably fights off cannibal tribes over his morning cup of tea, Isidore.”

  “I’m in no shape to emulate the cannibal hordes,” Villiers said, ladling his voice with such a layer of dramatic gloom that they all started laughing.

  “Then I need someone with your reputation,” Isidore said.

  “You can’t be serious!” Harriet exclaimed. “Are you really hoping that a scandal will make your husband return?”

  Isidore looked at her, one eyebrow raised, her lips curved in a hard little smile. “Can you think of one single reason why I shouldn’t try? I am married to a man whom I have no memory of meeting. He shows no concern for my whereabouts, and has never answered a single communication I sent to him, though I know he receives my letters.”

  “Surely mail goes astray between here and the Blue Nile.”

  “Occasionally I receive a note from his solicitors in London responding to something in a private letter I wrote to him. I am tired of this situation. I am married to the Duke of Cosway and I want to be a real duchess.”

  “Why does Cosway stay away from England?” Villiers asked, opening his eyes. “Are you so very terrifying?” He peered at her in an interested kind of way.

  “Why don’t you go to him?” Harriet asked, at the same moment.

  “He is an explorer,” Isidore said with withering scorn. “Can you see me on a camel, trotting around looking for the Blue Nile?”

  Harriet couldn’t help grinning. She herself was a sturdy type who probably could—if she had to—clamber up onto a camel. Isidore, on the other hand, looked as exotic and delicate as an orchid.

  “Can’t his mother summon him?” Jemma asked.

  “She pleads failure,” Isidore said. “And says that nothing will bring him back home, that he is the most stubborn of her children.”

  “I met Lady Cosway several times,” Jemma remarked. “If she put her foot down, the King of
England would bow to her will. I’d back her over her son.”

  “That’s just what I think. I’m trusting her to gauge the scandal and force him to return.”

  “How long has it been since he was in England?” Harriet asked.

  “Eighteen years. Eighteen! I could divorce him on some sort of grounds, I suppose.”

  “Non-consummation would be a possibility,” Villiers noted.

  “But I’m not stupid. It is a great deal better to be a duchess than not to be a duchess. I’ve lived on the Continent. I visited Jemma in Paris, and spent a great deal of time in my favorite of all cities, Venice. But now I want my life as an adult woman to begin. And I can’t do it while caught in this half-life!”

  Harriet blinked at her. It sounded as if Isidore were voicing the same things she had just been thinking to herself.

  “To be brutally honest,” Isidore continued, “I’m tired of sleeping alone. If Cosway turns out to be a horrible sort of man with whom I don’t want to spend time, well, then I might leave him and return to Italy. But at least I won’t have this talismanic virginity any longer. And I might have a child.”

  Harriet choked, and even Villiers opened his eyes. “Did I hear the word virgin?”

  “Isidore, you are being deliberately provoking,” Jemma said, handing her a small ruby glass of cordial. “You are trying to shock us. I assure you that I am horrifically shocked, so you can relent now.”

  “Virginity is a woman’s most valuable possession,” Villiers said, looking not in the least shocked.

  “Nonsense,” Jemma said briskly. “Since we’re all being so remarkably intimate, I don’t mind pointing out that a virgin without a brain is a useless creature.”

  “Ah, but a virgin with a brain is beyond the price of rubies.”

  “I have beauty too, I might point out,” Isidore said.

  “Vanity, thy name is woman,” Villiers said. But he was smiling. “I gather you intend to impress upon your husband the possibility that you might birth a cuckoo to inherit his dukedom.”