Duchess By Night
Harriet put her elbows on the table. She refused a cheroot, but drank more port than was good for her. Jem sat at the end of the table, his eyes laughing, not looking at her much.
But then he said something about the artwork at the ancient Roman site, Pompeii. Apparently every single drawing featured a phallus.
Even more interesting, it became clear that most of the men in the room had given those drawings plenty of study while touring Europe.
“My favorite object from Pompeii is the birdbath,” Jem said lazily. “Cope, you saw the birdbath, didn’t you? When you took the grand tour, I mean?”
He was playing with fire. “Of course,” Harriet said firmly, dropping her voice a notch. “It was inspiring.”
Lord Pensickle hooted, and shot her an edgy look. “Found it inspiring, did you? That’s rather revealing.”
“One must assume that you found your own inspiration elsewhere,” Villiers said. Harriet loved the fact that she had two champions: her supposed relative, Villiers, and her host.
“The brothel,” Pensickle said promptly. “Nice-looking frescoes. Nice-looking women. I see nothing particularly interesting about a birdbath that pees water. And no one has equipment of that size.” He gave them a squinty look, and Villiers smiled into his sleeve.
Jem left his seat at the head of the table and sat down next to Harriet. “After all,” he said, sotto voce, “there are only men here.”
Harriet was so happy she didn’t worry about it. Jem poured her port, and laughed at her jokes. When all the men launched into a rousing version of The Westminster Whore, he elbowed her until she joined in the chorus. When Lord Oke staggered away from the table and pissed in the corner, Harriet squealed and Jem elbowed her silent.
“I thought there was a chamber pot there,” wailed Oke.
Jem rang for Povy and ushered everyone out of the room so cleaning could commence.
They lay in bed that night and Jem played with drops of forty-year-old burgundy, trailing them across her breasts and licking them clean.
“You haven’t said anything about my offer of marriage,” he said, once they had bathed and fallen back into bed.
“What?”
“I asked you to marry me,” he said, hair falling over his eyes so she couldn’t see them. “Remember?”
“I—that was a joke. Wasn’t it?”
She held her breath, but he said: “What was your husband like?”
“He liked porridge in the morning.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“He didn’t make love the way you do.”
“I know that. Tell me what I don’t know.”
“He loved chess. More than anything, he loved chess.”
Jem was silent, but she knew him now, knew that his mind flew directly to the implication that Benjamin didn’t love her as much as the game. “Did he like playing judge?”
“No.” She hesitated. “I actually started sitting in the shire court before he died. He was so busy.” That was a lie, but it was a wifely lie.
They spent the rest of the night talking about the bonfire on Guy Fawkes day last that burned down Peter Nicoll’s dairy, and how hard it was to apportion blame to a crowd of drunk men. She told him about the theft of six oranges and then they talked again about Loveday Billing and her five husbands.
“Five!” Jem said. “Loveday was an energetic woman!”
“They kept leaving her,” Harriet said. “I think she just wanted one, but she couldn’t keep one in the house.”
“I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about my other wives,” Jem said. “It would never work for me.”
“For Loveday, once a husband was in jail, or in Italy, he was gone.”
Jem’s hair was over his eyes again. “It wasn’t like that for me, when Sally died. She was there still for so long. At the breakfast table, or down in the garden. I kept thinking I would turn a corner and she’d be there.”
“It sounds heartbreaking.” She brushed back his hair.
“Wasn’t it like that for you as well?”
“No.”
“So when your husband was gone, you never thought you saw him through a door, forgot he was gone, remembered something you had to tell him?”
How could she tell him what it was like when someone committed suicide? It was the one fact that she lived with, day in, day out, for months, for a year. She never forgot the cause of death long enough to think she saw Benjamin in the garden. The pain was in her bones, in her feet.
“He killed himself.”
She made herself say it, the deepest most self-hating thing she could do, because she couldn’t keep it quiet any longer. “You might want to reconsider your proposal. Quite a few people think that Benjamin was so deeply unhappy because—because of me.”
He gathered her roughly into his arms and held her against his chest and said one word. It was an ancient, Anglo Saxon word, the kind of violent swear word that never came from his mouth.
The wall she’d built up to keep him out cracked a little. And perhaps there was even a small crack in the wall under that one, the wall she’d put between the world and herself after Benjamin shot himself.
“Sweetheart,” Jem said huskily. He was kissing her hair, and squeezing her so tightly that her chest hurt.
She stifled a sob because she didn’t want to cry, not now. She wanted to hear what he was saying.
He wasn’t making a good deal of sense. He kept saying how sweet she was, and then what a total idiot her husband had been. And as for the people who could possibly imply that his suicide had anything to do with her, well, they were idiots too. And worse.
“It wasn’t that,” she said. “That didn’t matter so much. It was that he didn’t love me enough to stay here.”
“He was a fool,” Jem said roughly. “You know that, don’t you? I can’t not speak ill of the dead in this case.”
She nodded. But then: “Benjamin wasn’t a fool. He was just so unhappy that he forgot about me. There wasn’t room in his mind for me.”
“There’s nothing in my mind but you,” Jem said.
And then he set out to prove it to her, in an entirely satisfactory manner.
Chapter Thirty
An Unexpected Marriage
February 19, 1784
H arriet walked into the drawing room unprepared to find Isidore glittering like a bird of paradise. Or a princess. Harriet actually blinked for a moment, watching her. Isidore was clinging to Jem as if he were the tree she was determined to nest in—which was also strange and unexpected.
She was wearing a gown that fitted her like a second skin. It was made of a silver material that shimmered every time she moved. At her waist it billowed into soft billowing folds, transparent, pulled back to reveal watered silk of a deep blue color. It was a dress for Marie Antoinette. It was a dress for a princess…
Even more so when Harriet got close enough to realize that the bodice and skirts were sewn all over with tiny glittering stones. Diamonds. And there were diamonds in Isidore’s hair too.
It took her a few minutes to actually reach Isidore’s side; gentlemen were clustered around her as thickly as salmon swimming upstream, with Jem like a rock in the middle. He met her eyes over Isidore’s head and mouthed something, but she couldn’t understand.
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