When the Duke Returns Page 9

  “I don’t really, but I can improvise from Portuguese.” He turned back to Signora Angelico who was declaring herself felicissima to encounter, finally, the marito of her darling little duchess, whom she had loved since the moment she first saw her.

  “Signora Angelico made gowns for my aunt for many years,” Isidore explained.

  “Your aunt?”

  “I lived with my aunt after we married.”

  “Of course! Your aunt.”

  “Augustina Del’Fino,” Isidore filled in.

  So he didn’t know every bit of information about what she’d been doing for the last eight years since they married…well, perhaps it was more than eight years.

  Signora Angelico turned away, her hands in the air, scattering her seamstresses in all directions.

  “How long have we been married?” Simeon inquired.

  Isidore glanced at him. She would make an excellent politician; she had a way of putting a fellow in his place with nothing more than a raised eyebrow. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Why would I ask if I did?” he said, surprised.

  “We were engaged in June, 1765, married by proxy in June, 1773.”

  “Of course. You said you were twelve when we actually married.”

  Signora Angelico was gesticulating madly from the other side of the room.

  “And you were eighteen.”

  “I was in India. How long did you live with my mother?”

  “A matter of a few months. I’m afraid that we were not suited temperamentally, and we all agreed that I would be happier with my aunt.” She turned away. “Cara signora, arriviamo!”

  Signora Angelico was chattering away with Isidore in Italian, so rapidly that Simeon couldn’t follow. She was pulling bolts of cloth from the shelves and throwing them on the table, screaming at her assistants, waving her hands around…

  Simeon went back to thinking. So Isidore went to live with her aunt and presumably expected him to collect her up at some point.

  Signora turned away so he said to her, “Just when did you think I’d come back for you?”

  “When I was sixteen.”

  “But that was—”

  “Seven years ago.”

  He stared down at her.

  “You’ve been waiting for me for seven years?”

  “What did you think I’ve been doing?” And she turned away, cooing over the signora’s choice of cloth.

  Simeon stared down at the bolt of fabric. It was spun of a material so fine that it looked like cobwebs, and yet he knew he had finer in his warehouses. He had shipped home trunks of fabric.

  “Did you ever receive fabric I sent from India?”

  She glanced up at him and her eyes were like chips of blue ice now. “They must have gone as astray as you yourself.”

  With a sinking feeling, he remembered that he sent everything to his mother’s direction, who then refused acceptance. It seemed a strange decision on his part, now he thought of it.

  He had chosen beautiful pieces and put them to the side, sending them home with instructions that they be delivered to the duchess. It was only now dawning on him that there really were—and had been for years—two duchesses.

  The mantua-maker was matching the silvery fabric with a delicate lace tinted a faint blue. Isidore would look like the snow princess in a Russian fairy tale, the ones in which the princess had a heart of ice.

  “I don’t like it,” he said abruptly.

  Signora Angelico was clearly not used to being interrupted—nor to being countered. She flew into a paroxysm of exclamations, half in English, half in Italian.

  Isidore turned to him and hissed, “You can’t say that sort of thing to Signora Angelico! The Queen of France herself has ordered night clothing from signora.”

  “I don’t care whether she sews the king’s slippers with her teeth,” Simeon said. “This fabric isn’t of the quality I’d like you to wear. I may not care much for polite society, Isidore, but I know fabric.”

  “You wouldn’t—”

  He turned to Signora Angelico. She was as ruffled as a hen in the rain, her cheeks stained with crimson, her hands waving wildly around her head.

  But Simeon had bargained with many a tradesman in places where to lose the bargain was to lose one’s head. “This fabric isn’t good enough,” he said.

  “Not good enough!” Signora Angelico’s face took on a purple hue. “This is the very best, magnifico, lovely in every way, fit for—”

  Simeon rubbed it between his fingers and shook his head. “Indian silk.”

  “Silk from the looms of the Maharaja himself—”

  Simeon shook his head. “Signora, signora…surely you don’t take me for a dunce?” He pushed the fabric to the side and sat on the table.

  “Get up!” Isidore said to him in an urgent undertone. “You can’t sit before us.”

  Simeon snapped his fingers at one of the girls, who were flocking nervously against the wall as if they thought he would faint merely from the signora’s frown. “Chairs for Her Grace and Signora Angelico.”

  Two of them scuttled over with straight-backed chairs, used by the girls while they engaged in hand-sewing. Perfect. Signora Angelico was now seated just below him. He smiled down at her. “I can tell that you are a woman who adores fabric,” he cooed. “A woman ravished by antherine silk, so glossy and light, perhaps with a touch of mignonette lace.”

  Signora’s whole face changed. “You know your fabrics, Your Grace.”

  He smiled at her. “Now this—” he put a finger disdainfully on the silk she proposed. “Paduasoy. A nice strong silk. Perhaps good enough for some. But not,” and he gave every word a tiny emphasis, “not for my wife, signora.”

  “You!” she said. “You are going to lead my poor little duchess on a chase, are you not?” Her black eyes snapped, but he could feel the rigid backs of her girls relax.

  “It is a man’s duty when faced with such beauty as graces my wife,” he said solemnly, reaching down and bringing her hand to his lips. “Of course, had I seen you in my youth…”

  Signora bounced to her feet. “As if I could have been tempted by such a callow young thing as a raw duke!” She clapped her hands. “Lucia! Bring me that bolt of tiffany.”

  “Dare I hope the tiffany harks from the looms of Margilan?”

  “You will see!” she crowed.

  Isidore sat in her chair, stunned into silence. After that, Signora Angelico was putty in Simeon’s hands. He rejected the tiffany as too harsh; they finally found a taffeta he found acceptable. It was cherry red, with only a touch of stiffness to it.

  “I see it falling to the ground with a froth at the feet and a small train.”

  “But the color…” Signora Angelico shook her head. “If only I had a—”

  “Wash it in tea.”

  “Wash this fabric in tea?” She looked down at the fabric. It looked as if it had been woven by fairies; if you let it fall through your fingers it sounded like a whispered song.

  “Of course,” Simeon said. He kissed her hand again, and that was that. Isidore was to have a gown of tea-washed taffeta, edged in a thin border of glossy lace made in Brussels.

  The signora was drunk with the garment she saw in her imagination. “Coming to the mid finger,” she murmured to herself, “décolletage, of course.”

  “Are we finished?” Isidore asked, standing up.

  “Tsk, tsk,” Simeon said. “These things take time.”

  “Not for me,” Isidore retorted, looking to make sure that Signora Angelico wasn’t listening. She wasn’t; she looked as dreamy as her aunt had while practicing a new sonata. “The first cloth would have been just fine. I can’t imagine why you took such an interest, since the nightdress will presumably be for another’s man’s pleasure!”

  Simeon opened his mouth—and closed it. She had a point. Isidore was intoxicating; he tended to forget everything in her presence.

  “We could have been home by now,” Isidore said. “
I have another appointment.” She glanced down at the watch she wore on a ribbon and gave a little shriek. “And I’m late. If you please!”

  “I must return to Revels House immediately,” Simeon said in the carriage. “There are a few outstanding problems with the estate. I’ll return to London next week and we can continue the discussion of our annulment.”

  Isidore looked at him. “Certainly,” she said. “If I happen to be in residence.”

  He looked absurdly surprised, given that her tone had been quite mild.

  Chapter Eleven

  Gore House, Kensington

  London Seat of the Duke of Beaumont

  February 27, 1784

  The Duke of Beaumont had had a detestable day. His wife had not appeared at breakfast, and though Jemma rarely made an appearance, he had rather hoped she would. The House of Lords was erupting into all sorts of strange battles to do with Pitt’s India Bill and the Mutiny Bill. The king had said Fox was trying to reduce him to a mere figurehead. Fox was trying to force the resignation of the ministry…

  He was tired. He was so bone-tired that he actually wavered a bit as he descended from his carriage. One of his footmen darted forward as if he were a man of eighty, and Elijah had to wave him away. It was humiliating.

  His body was failing him.

  Oh, he’d never fainted in public again, as he had last year. Right on the floor of the House of Lords, he had collapsed.

  These days, to everyone’s eyes, he seemed absolutely fine.

  But he knew he wasn’t. He felt a clock ticking over his shoulder, and its tick was louder since they’d returned from the Christmas holidays. Perhaps because it had been so relaxing to go to the country for the holidays, to wander through one of Jemma’s outrageous masquerades, to play chess with his wife, to bicker amiably about politics with acquaintances who didn’t think the outcome of any particular vote was of much importance.

  Returning to the seething brew that was the House of Lords was difficult.

  No, he hadn’t fainted since the first time.

  But he had passed out, just for a second, now and then. So far he had always been sitting down, and no one had realized.

  But the truth—the truth was that he needed to talk to his wife.

  Jemma had come back from Paris so they could create an heir. He could hardly bring the words to the surface of his mind. This wasn’t the way he wanted to bed Jemma. They had engaged in an elaborate, intricate ballet over the last year. They were beginning…

  He wasn’t sure what they were beginning. But he knew that it was important. More important than anything before.

  And still his body failed him.

  “You work too hard, Your Grace!” his butler scolded him. “Those rapscallions in the government need to learn to do without you for a time.”

  Only he knew that he had already cut back his workload. He smiled at Fowle, handed over his greatcoat, inquired of the duchess’s whereabouts.

  “In the library, Your Grace,” the butler said. “With a chess board, and waiting for you, I believe.”

  He walked into the library and paused for a moment just to savor what lay before him. Jemma was heartbreakingly, astoundingly beautiful. She was sitting in a patch of light cast by many candles, examining her chess board. She had her hair swept up in some sort of complicated arrangement, but not powdered. It was the color of old gold, the deep happy color of sunshine. She was wearing an open robe of flowered gauze, worked with gold twists, that came to a deep V over her breasts.

  The pulse of longing he felt was for everything about his wife: her wit, her beauty, her breasts, her brilliance…

  How in the hell could he not have realized it when they first married? How could he have wasted those years, thrown them away on politics and his mistress? Couldn’t he have thought—just imagined—that perhaps time wasn’t a gift one had for the asking? Couldn’t he have remembered that his father had died at thirty-four?

  And he was thirty-four, as of this month. Time wove its changes, marched apace…he would give anything to have back those first weeks of marriage when Jemma looked to him for advice, when she cuddled beside him in the morning, asking questions about the House.

  Great fool that he was back then, he had leapt from their bed eager to be at the House, not sitting about with a wife whom he barely knew. Off to his mistress, who appeared during the noon hour on Tuesdays and Fridays. That was part of his routine: emerge from the House of Lords and exhaust himself with Sarah, right there in his office.

  Good old Sarah Cobbett. She loved him; he loved her in a way. One had to hope that she was happy.

  He’d pensioned her off after Jemma caught them on the desk in his chambers.

  The stab of guilt was an old friend, though it seemed to grow fiercer with the years, not less so.

  For her part, Jemma seemed to have forgiven him. Perhaps.

  She looked up at him, and her smile made his heart stop.

  Life had given him a woman who was—he knew it with a bone-deep certainty—the most intelligent woman in Europe. And he had thrown her away to rut with a kindly woman whose only claim to intelligence was that she was never late to their twice-weekly appointment, not once during the six years in which Sarah was his mistress.

  He couldn’t even remember Sarah’s face now, which just made him feel guiltier.

  “Look at this!” Jemma called to him.

  He walked over and looked down at the board, rather blindly.

  “It’s a counter gambit credited to Giuoco. I think I’ve improved on it. Look…” and she moved the pieces so quickly that he almost didn’t follow, but of course he did. Their brains were remarkably similar.

  He sat down.

  “Terrible day?” she asked.

  It was almost too much. Her eyes were blue, like the midnight blue of the sky at night. And he wanted—her. Life. To stay here, on this earth with Jemma. To see the child they would create, if they had time.

  “Elijah!” she said, startled. Slipped from her seat and sat on his knee. He turned his face into her shoulder. She smelled like roses.

  He didn’t cry, of course. He never cried. He hadn’t when his father died, and he wouldn’t cry over his own death either.

  But he put an arm around his wife and pulled her closer. She hadn’t been this near to him in years.

  It felt good.

  Chapter Twelve

  Revels House

  February 29, 1784

  Simeon knew the moment that Honeydew opened the study door that there was more trouble. He put down his quill.

  The news that the Duke of Cosway had returned, and that he was actually paying the family debts, had spread like wildfire. Half of England seemed to be lined up outside the servants’ door, begging five minutes to plead cases, generally to do with bills that his father or mother had refused to pay. Some stretched back twenty years.

  “Yes?”

  “We have a visitor,” Honeydew announced.

  Simeon waited, bracing himself for an irate creditor.

  “Her Grace, the Duchess of Cosway.”

  “Oh—” He bit off the curse. He was exhausted, he was dusty, and he could smell the water closets even with the door to his study closed. Isidore would probably take one look at this moldering excuse for a ducal palace and demand the annulment by tomorrow. Which would be a good thing, of course.

  Honeydew had become distinctly more friendly, and had even stopped giving Simeon directives regarding his attire and manners. But he didn’t seem to be able to stop himself this time. “If you’d like to—”

  Simeon looked at him and Honeydew dropped the suggestion. Likely Isidore did think he should be wearing a wig and waistcoat buttoned to the neck with a cravat on top. Even more likely, she pictured Revels House as perfumed and elegant.

  He pulled his coat down, straightened his cuffs, noted the ink stain and dismissed it. He could bother with white cuffs and a cravat when he had to go to London and find himself another wife.


  “Her Grace is in the Yellow Salon,” Honeydew said rather nervously.

  “Yellow? Which one is that?”

  “The drapes used to be yellow,” Honeydew admitted.

  “Ah,” Simeon said. “The Curdled Milk Salon.”

  There was actually a smile on his butler’s face. “This way, Your Grace.”

  Isidore was seated on a straw-colored sofa, facing away from him. That straw color had once been lemon yellow, Simeon noted to himself. Isidore looked like a bright jewel perched on a haystack. His wife’s hair was the glossy black of a raven’s breast; her lips were cherries at their reddest. She looked like every boyhood fantasy he’d ever had about an exotic princess who would dance before him, wearing little more than a scarf.

  He glanced down and groaned silently.

  He’d tamed his body into perfect submission until he met his wife. He started buttoning his long coat as he walked forward, starting from the bottom.

  “Isidore,” he said, when he had crossed enough of the faded carpet so that she could hear him without a shout. The only thing his house had in abundance was space.

  She leapt to her feet, turning to face him. She was wearing a tight jacket over a buttoned waistcoat, with a tall beehive hat on top of her curls. The jacket was a rich plum color; gloves of the same color lay discarded on the sofa beside her.

  “Duke,” she said, sinking into a curtsy.

  He walked toward her and didn’t bow. Instead he took her hands in his and smiled down at her, resisting a sudden temptation to snatch her into his arms and steal a kiss. One didn’t kiss a wife who was not a wife. “This is a lovely surprise.”

  When she smiled, her lips formed a perfect cupid’s bow. “I told you I might not wait for your visit to London. I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said sweetly. She pulled her hands free and sat down.

  He sat on the sofa facing hers. It gave a great squeaking groan on feeling his weight, as if it were about to collapse to the ground. “I am embarrassed to welcome you here. The house is in a terrible state. This room, for example…”

  “It looks clean,” she offered, looking about.