When the Duke Returns Page 8

  “He told me that it was up to me to make sure that my fortune didn’t turn out as he prophesied.”

  Isidore succumbed to curiosity. “Please tell!”

  He shook his head. “Maybe when we’re old and gray.”

  “If we’re old and gray together!” she pointed out.

  “Are you angry at me because I didn’t return when you came of age or because I’m offering you the chance now to annul the marriage?”

  “I’m not angry with you,” Isidore said, withdrawing her hand. Her voice sounded petulant, but she felt out of her depth with this huge man.

  Shamefully, she kept looking at him and thinking virgin? How could he be a virgin? He looked all man, all male…

  She could feel her cheeks getting pink.

  “Or are you angry at me because I’m not knowledgeable about conjugal intimacies?”

  “No!” she said, turning to the window. “Look, Cosway, we’re passing by Somerset House. If you crane your neck you might see the loggia on the south terrace. It was just finished…The Inns of Court are very close now.”

  It was barely an hour before they were back in the carriage again. Isidore was in shock.

  “I just can’t believe it!” she said. “You ought to be able to annul a marriage easily on the grounds of nonconsummation. I’m sure everyone told me so a thousand times over the past few years.”

  Her husband raised an eyebrow. “I had no idea that people were so interested in the state of our bedchamber.”

  “Cosway,” Isidore said impatiently, “I am twenty-three years old. I’ve been jaunting around Europe for years. Unless people actually checked their Debrett’s, they tended to think we were merely engaged, and I never corrected that impression. Even Jemma, one of my closest friends, thought that for a time. It was less humiliating to let people think such.”

  “But—”

  “But there are plenty who read their Debrett’s like a Bible, so they know of the proxy wedding. They would inquire when you were returning. Nonconsummation has been mentioned to me many times. I know Villiers brought it up. And now it seems that it isn’t an option.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cosway said. “Even if it were legal, I would have to pass a test of my incapability. I can’t.”

  Isidore made herself say the words, because she had to know: “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really sure?”

  “No question. Is that what you’re worrying about?”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Because I could show you.”

  She felt her eyes grow round. “What?”

  He had a wicked smile. He started pulling open his greatcoat. “I could show you—”

  “Don’t!” she snapped.

  “The truth is that I find it rather difficult to be around you,” he said, leaning back and leaving his greatcoat alone, to her relief.

  She felt inexplicably hurt. Of course, he was eager to get an annulment, but there was no need to be so brutal about it. “According to that solicitor, there are other ways to dissolve our marriage,” she said a bit stiffly. “So you needn’t give up the dream of your docile little hen-wit.”

  “Hen-wit? Not a kind word, Isidore…But I wasn’t referring to the question of annulment, but to the state of my cock.”

  She gasped. “You—”

  “Mayn’t I use that word in front of a lady?” he inquired, as mild as sweet butter and all the time his eyes laughing at her.

  “No!” she managed. “It makes you sound like—like—”

  “Tsk, tsk, Isidore. I have the strangest sense that you and my mother are actually quite alike. But how can that be? After all, I rescued you from Lord Strange’s notorious house party, did I not? Even I have heard tell of its brothel-like atmosphere. But here you are, quailing at a good, solid Anglo-Saxon word like—”

  “Don’t!”

  “Are you telling me that language like that wasn’t flying around Strange’s dining room?”

  “I tried not to listen to that sort of conversation.”

  “You did?” He leaned forward suddenly. “Then without inappropriate words, Isidore, may I assure you that when I’m in your presence that part of my body stands to attention?”

  Isidore could feel herself growing pink. And she always thought she looked her worst with ruddy cheeks. “Must you say these things?”

  “You impugned my manhood,” he said. “I couldn’t have you thinking that I was a limp lily.”

  “How would—” she said, and broke off.

  “How would I know?” His whole face was alight with amusement. “Really, I do have to show you, Isidore.”

  “No!”

  He barked with laughter. “I can’t imagine you at Strange’s house. Even in the half hour during which I managed to stay awake, I was told an entirely salacious story about a bishop. And his miter.”

  Isidore shuddered. “I hated that place.”

  “Then why were you there?”

  She took a deep breath. “To force you to return home, of course.”

  “That’s what my mother said.”

  “She was right. I had reached the point at which I thought either you came home or—”

  “Or?”

  Isidore suddenly saw exactly how to get back at him for offering to show her his equipment. She leaned forward and patted his hand. “Jemma told me once that it is a wife’s duty to provide an heir if a husband is incapable. Since you showed little signs of returning from Africa, I decided I should begin to explore the possibilities.”

  All traces of amusement were gone from his face.

  “You were going to produce an heir for me?”

  She shrugged. “And Cosway, if things are not entirely successful on our wedding night, should we decide to stay together, I wouldn’t want you to worry. I can always—”

  “You will never substitute another man for me! I don’t know where you got the damned idea that I might be incapable!”

  “Neither one of us can know the truth to that,” she pointed out. She was dancing on the edge of jeopardy and it felt wonderful.

  His mouth opened like that of a fish out of water.

  She leaned forward and patted his knee this time. “A virgin at your age…well. I would never tell a soul.” And she beamed at him.

  It was a beautiful moment. It almost made up for the way he was planning to annul their marriage due to her unsuitability as a wife.

  He surprised her.

  After staring at her for a moment, he collapsed into a howling fit of laughter.

  She sat silently for a moment, but Cosway had the kind of laughter that made you want to join in, and she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.

  “You think that because I haven’t tried out the equipment on a woman, it doesn’t work at all?”

  “It’s a reasonable—”

  He started howling with laughter again, and finally straightened up.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” she said with reasonable dignity.

  “It’s you. I suppose it’s due to being a lady. One can only assume from your idea about my equipment that you yourself have never—” He raised an eyebrow suggestively.

  “What?” she asked, completely confused.

  “You’ve never pleasured yourself.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “Bloody hell, you haven’t.”

  She felt herself turning pink. “I see no need to engage in coarse language.”

  “Shit and dam—”

  “Don’t!”

  “I’m talking about pleasure,” he said. “The kind you apparently have never had.”

  Isidore kept silent. What pleasure she had had or not was none of his business.

  “I should have known,” he muttered to himself. “Now look here, Isidore. My—well, what word am I allowed to use, then?”

  “I don’t know. Pizzle, I suppose. Though no one ever talks to me about pizzles.”

  “They want to,”
Simeon said. “You just haven’t given them the chance. Pizzle, for Christ’s sake. Sounds like a word a five-year-old might use when learning to take a piss. Are you sure we can’t do with a bolder word, one more in line with the size of the thing?”

  Isidore opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again and said: “Pizzle.”

  “Right. Well, my pizzle is a pizzalone, in Italian. A big pizzle, Isidore.”

  He was still making fun of her. She folded her arms over her chest. “There’s nothing sadder than a man who feels the need to boast about the size of his equipment,” she said sweetly.

  “It’s not boasting, just stating.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Want me to prove it?” And he put his hands back on the front of his greatcoat.

  “No!”

  Simeon looked at Isidore. She was laughing and indignant at the same time. She didn’t look docile, or sweet, or biddable…she looked like a banked fire waiting for just one spark to flare. She had never pleasured herself…she had never…she had waited.

  His blood was pounding through his body, begging him, telling him, commanding him. It took all his strength to resist the impulse to pull her into his arms. “I can completely understand your anxiety,” he said.

  “You can?”

  “You’re buying a pig in a poke. Unlike the rest of the Englishmen around here, I haven’t been strutting around brothels for the last fifteen years. But if we did marry, I wouldn’t bring you any diseases, Isidore.”

  She nodded.

  “You have a reasonable suspicion that my pizzle is not in working condition. Out of shape. Withered from lack of use. Tired from my own handling—”

  “That’s enough.”

  “So I would have to prove it to you, obviously, before I could expect you to commit to our marriage.”

  “But you yourself are not committed, since I’m not a docile little hen-wit.”

  There was a moment of silence in the carriage. Her summary of his marital ambitions seemed unnecessarily harsh. “It’s not that I want to marry an unintelligent woman,” he began painstakingly, but she interrupted him.

  “You just don’t want to marry me.”

  “It’s not a question of you, Isidore.”

  He had that look again, the one of total calm and control. Isidore understood Simeon a bit better now—and pitied him for it. Her husband thought he had anger and lust under control, not to mention fear. He thought he had life under control.

  He was a fool, but that wasn’t the same thing as being a madman, the way she and Jemma had thought he might be. And from what he was saying, he wasn’t incapable. Clearly, she needed to think about what to do next.

  “If we call it off, I’ll go back to Africa directly,” he offered. “Sign the papers and keep out of your hair while you find another husband.”

  She nodded. “Very generous of you.” She looked down and found that her hands had curled into fists. We call it off? Simeon clearly thought that he was as much in control of the end of their marriage as he had been of the first eleven years.

  “I expect it might put the new husband off his feed to have the old husband hanging around assessing him,” Simeon said. “I might want to engage in a pizzle contest, for example.”

  Isidore smiled stiffly. “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw such a contest in Smyrna.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On the Mediterranean sea, part of the Anatolian Empire. I met a vizier and his brother who were traveling to present themselves as possible spouses to a sheikh’s daughter. The decisive factor? A pizzle contest.”

  “Size?”

  “Size and endurance,” Simeon said. “The sheikh made his entire harem available for the duration of the contest. He invited me to join the contest.”

  “Was the sheikh just taking anyone? Not that they shouldn’t have offered it to you, but you are married,” Isidore pointed out.

  “Oh, the sheikh wouldn’t have cared about an English marriage. In order to enter the contest, you had to offer a tiger ruby. And as it happened, I have something of a collection. I do believe that some of the gentlemen in question had no expectation of winning the princess’s hand but they were happily offering up tiger rubies anyway.”

  “Because of the harem,” Isidore asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Beautiful women,” Simeon said. “Exquisite in every way.”

  “Wonderful.” Her tone could have curdled milk. “How did you ever resist the temptation?”

  He grinned at her. “I had you.”

  “Well,” Isidore said, “You didn’t—”

  “Have you,” he put in. “You’re right. Let’s put it this way: I didn’t have you. Yet. But you were worth more than a night in a harem and a tiger ruby.”

  Isidore thought of various remarks she might make, comparing her worth to that of the hen-wit, and stopped herself. “What does a tiger ruby look like? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Gorgeous: rubies with a tawny yellow streak through them. They’re tremendously rare. In the end the sheikh was able to garner only eight such rubies even with the lure of his harem.”

  “How on earth do you know? Did you go to the wedding?”

  “Of course! Vizier Takla Haymanot won, and after eleven days of feasting (Takla needed a rest after the contest), he married the sheikh’s daughter. Then I bought the eight rubies from the sheikh and we were all happy.”

  “Will you show me one?”

  “Not at the moment. They’re in the bank.”

  “In a bank? If I had rubies like that—though of course their history is rather disagreeable…”

  “Disagreeable? They were traded for pleasure.”

  “I doubt the ladies of the harem felt so.”

  “If they didn’t, they did a good job disguising it. They got to choose, you know.”

  Isidore felt herself turning a bit pink, but she was fascinated. “They got to choose?”

  “You have to understand that this particular sheikh had two hundred and thirteen wives in his harem. And he himself was rather elderly. So the young ladies in his harem had little entertainment. The eight suitors were brought forward, and the ladies were allowed to choose. That was another aspect of the contest: if no lady chose to bed a suitor in a given round, he was out of the competition.”

  “Oh!”

  “You would look lovely in a harem veil,” he remarked.

  If she forced a consummation to the marriage by prancing about wearing nothing but a veil, Simeon would never be granted an annulment. It was something to think about.

  “I rather like the way that sheikh managed things,” Isidore said.

  “Really?”

  “Though if I were the princess, I would have talked the sheikh into changing the contest.”

  “And?” Simeon prompted.

  “I think it would be very interesting if the princess too had been able to choose her future consort, the way the ladies of the harem were. I presume the gentlemen in question were not dressed?”

  He looked genuinely surprised, which was very satisfying. He needn’t think he was the only one who could talk about bawdy things.

  The carriage drew to a halt and she automatically started putting her gloves back on.

  Simeon reached over and pulled one away.

  “What—”

  Then he snatched the other. And finally, when the carriage door opened, he flung them straight out into the street. They flew past the face of a startled groomsman, who gave a little shriek and stumbled backward, falling onto his bottom.

  “You are utterly deranged!” Isidore said with conviction, leaning forward to look at the street. “I can’t go to my appointment without gloves.” Sure enough, her blue gloves were lying in a puddle of blackened rainwater.

  “You hate them,” Simeon said, leaping out of the carriage and holding out his own ungloved hand.

  She ground her teeth and then put her hand in his.

  The shock of heat she felt w
as entirely unreasonable.

  Chapter Ten

  65 Blackfriars Street

  February 27, 1784

  They were before a row of houses, in a part of London Simeon didn’t know. Not that he really knew London. “Doesn’t your mantua-maker own a shop?” he asked. The groomsman was standing at the door of a small house.

  “We are visiting Signora Angelico’s studio, Cosway,” Isidore told him. “This is a great honor, extended only to her countrywomen, so please try to behave yourself.”

  “Couldn’t you call me by my given name?”

  “It’s not polite.”

  He ignored that. “My name is Simeon. It’s a good, workable name and I thank God I didn’t end up Godfrey, like my poor brother.”

  “We’re not supposed to call each other by given names.”

  “I already call you Isidore.”

  “I didn’t give you permission to do so!”

  “Every time you call me Cosway, it sounds like cock to me,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe you should go right on calling me Cosway, and I’ll just—”

  Isidore laughed. “Fine. Simeon.”

  Signora Angelico worked in a large open room on the bottom floor. The first thing Simeon saw were the open shelves that lined the room. Rolled cloth—silk, satin, taffeta—was stacked to the topmost level. It reminded him of souks in Morocco. The colors glowed coyly from the ends of the rolls, deep red silk, lilac shot with silver, the clear yellow of buttercups in early spring. Below the cloth were boxes, filled to the brim and spilling forth their contents: thread, buttons, yards and yards of ribbon. Everywhere there was lace. Lace hanging from wooden poles, lace thrown into piles, thin rivulets of lace and fatter rivers of it heaped on the tables that scattered the room.

  Isidore had walked directly into the room, while Simeon paused on the threshold. Now she was dropping a deep curtsy before a woman in late middle age, with a deliciously curvy figure. The mantua-maker was kissing Isidore energetically on both cheeks, calling her bella.

  Then they both turned and looked at him.

  Simeon walked forward and swept into a flourishing bow. “Duke,” Isidore said, “may I present Signora Angelico?”

  “Onorato di conoscerla, signora.”

  Isidore raised an eyebrow. “I had no idea you spoke Italian.”