Chapter 7

Mr. Hardinge seemed more than usually attentive. He seated himself beside her at Mrs. Crofton’s concert and leaned slightly toward her, making their conversation exclusive to themselves for the ten minutes or so before the first performance, a pianoforte recital, was to begin. He smiled engagingly at her and talked about the violinist who was to play later and whom he had heard play in Vienna. He really was a very charming and interesting man, Harriet thought. He was also young and tolerably handsome. She smiled warmly at him.

“It must be wonderful to have traveled and to have seen the most beautiful places in Europe,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed. “But I realized at the time and I realize more fully now that seeing it all in company with a like-minded companion, someone one cared for, would make the experience that much more wonderful.”

“Yes,” she said. “I can believe that.”

She wondered how soon he would declare himself. She did not think it was vanity that made her believe he surely would. He would be a wonderful catch. Amanda had said so when she knew that he was to escort Harriet to the concert. And Harriet knew it and felt it herself. With him she could find all the security and potentially all the contentment she had known with Godfrey. But none of the heartache over his weak health. She could marry Mr. Hardinge and be safe again.

Except that the thought sickened her. How could she consider becoming his wife when she was another man's mistress? How could she even consider doing that to him?

She had wondered before taking the irrevocable step how her conscience would react. Now she knew.

“I suspected as much when I first set eyes on you this evening, Lady Wingham,” Mr. Hardinge said, touching his fingers to the back of her hand for a moment and looking into her face with a twinkle in his eyes, “but now I know it for certain. You outshine every other lady present tonight. You always do, of course, but tonight you look especially lovely.”

“Why, thank you, sir.” She laughed lightly. He was not given to paying her lavish compliments. She had fallen in love with the rich green satin the moment she had set eyes on it, and her modiste had assured her that it was an inspired choice with her eyes. But Susan had said it was not the gown.

“You’re pretty, Mama,” she had said when Harriet had gone into the nursery earlier to hug her and kiss her and tuck her into bed.

“I feel pretty,” Harriet had said. “It is a lovely gown, is it not?”

“Not the gown.” Susan had held her face in her two small hands and gazed into it “You, Mama. You’re pretty.”

Harriet had laughed and rubbed her nose against Susan’s.

But she knew what Susan must have meant. And Mr. Hardinge too. She had noticed it herself in her looking glass. A heightened rosiness in her cheeks and brightness in her eyes. She had been alarmed and had held her palms to her cheeks for a while. It had seemed so very obvious to her that it was the face of a woman who had been awakened to the pleasure of the flesh that very day. It amazed her that everyone who looked at her did not immediately point an accusing finger. Yet when she had arrived home late in the afternoon, Amanda had greeted her quite placidly and asked her how she had enjoyed her shopping trip with Lady Beaconswood.

Harriet had sat through the tea telling a pack of lies in a brightly enthusiastic voice. She wondered how many other lies she was going to have to tell in the coming weeks. A whole set of them for every Monday and Thursday afternoon, she supposed.

“Ah,” Mr. Hardinge said, “the concert is about to begin.”

Mrs. Crofton had stepped into the empty center of her large drawing room and was smiling graciously about her, waiting for the growing hush to become complete silence.

The Earl and Countess of Barthorpe and Lady Phyllis Reeder were sitting across the room from Harriet and Mr. Hardinge, close to the doors. Harriet had noticed them earlier and had looked away from the girl, quelling a twinge of guilt. Why should she feel guilty? If she had not become his mistress, someone else would have. There must be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of women in his past. And he was the kind of man who would have mistresses throughout his life, despite marriage. Harriet certainly did not need that particular guilt on her shoulders.

She looked across the room again as everyone applauded Mrs. Crofton’s opening remarks and the pianist settled himself with a flourish of coattails and a theatrical flexing of fingers at the instrument. The Duke of Tenby was just seating himself beside Lady Phyllis and bowing and raising her hand to his lips. He glanced about the room in the moments before the music began, paused at Harriet, lifted his quizzing glass languidly to his eye, and then lowered it again before inclining his head rather stiffly in her direction.

Harriet concentrated her full attention on the pianoforte and harp recitals that followed and on the soprano’s aria. It was what she had expected and the way he had warned her it must be. She would become accustomed to the double lives they must lead. There were probably a dozen such couples in this very room, couples who lived separately and respectably in society yet together and intimately in private. She did not find the thought particularly comforting.

He looked extremely handsome and elegant and rather haughty, she thought. And of course she was not the only person who had noticed his late arrival. The Duke of Tenby had a way of attracting general attention wherever he went, though she did not believe he did so deliberately. Everyone was marvelously interested in his apparent courtship of Lady Phyllis. Harriet heard talk about it wherever she went. He would be married to Lady Phyllis before September.

Harriet kept her eyes off the two of them and listened to the music. And yet all the while she was aware of her body as she had never been during her marriage except perhaps the day after her wedding night. She was aware of a new tenderness in her breasts, caused by his hands and fingers, by his mouth and tongue, by the press of his chest against hers. And of a slight stiffness in her legs, which had been held wide by his for long stretches of time. And of a soreness that was not exactly painful and a deep throbbing in the passage he had occupied and worked for several minutes three separate times.

Her body would become accustomed to the new facts, she told herself. But she felt amazed that other people did not look at her and see her for what she was. She felt naked. Her hand strayed to her bosom to check that her low-cut gown covered her decently enough. She felt like a scarlet woman.

Yes, she now knew what her conscience was going to do to her.

After the interval, during which she allowed Mr. Hardinge to fetch her a drink without relinquishing her seat, the chair beside Lady Phyllis remained empty. Obviously the Duke of Tenby was pursuing his courtship with his customary caution. Harriet let out a silent sigh of relief and prepared to enjoy the violinist Mr. Hardinge had heard in Vienna. She also felt unreasonably bereft. He had not even crossed the room to bid her a good evening.

Lord Bruce Ingram paused on the threshold of the Duke of Tenby’s breakfast room on Monday morning and grinned.

“You are looking thoroughly out of sorts, Archie,” he said. “Might I be permitted to say ‘I told you so’? You would not come to Annette’s last night even though you dismissed Bridget a few weeks ago. Annette’s girls were in fine form—at least Elsie was. Celibacy never did suit you.” 

“Have a beefsteak,” the duke said, waving his friend to a chair at the table. “I had one cooked for you, knowing you were coming. Though cooked seems an inappropriate word to describe the way you like it. I believe my chef showed it to the fire and set it on the plate. Behold it swimming in its own juice. It is revolting.”

“Ah.” Lord Bruce rubbed his hands together in appreciation as his grace’s butler placed the beefsteak before him. “My compliments to your chef, Archie. It is just the way I like it. I had better haul you off to Annette’s tonight. There is a new girl I want to try. And you are looking green about the gills. A sure sign of sexual deprivation, old chap.”

The duke dragged his eyes away from the plate with its almost raw beefsteak and scowled down at the small pile of letters beside his plate. “I am coming under inspection,” he said.

“Not a comfortable feeling,” Lord Bruce said sympathetically, tucking into his breakfast, "especially when one is a duke and should be a law unto oneself. Your mother is coming to town?”

“Worse,” the duke said gloomily. “Ten times worse.”

Lord Bruce grimaced. “The duchess?” he said.

“My grandmother, yes,” the duke said. “She is not coming to keep an eye on me and press forward my nuptials, of course. She is coming because Aunt Sophie has arrived from Bath and has taken it into her head that she wants to enjoy the pleasures of town one more time before the everlasting silence descends.”

Lord Bruce tittered.

“The woman must be a hundred if she is a day,” the duke said. “I can remember going to Bath with family greetings on the occasion of her eightieth or ninetieth birthday—I was never sure which. And that was when I discovered Freddie Sullivan about to get married. Six years ago. That makes my great aunt eighty-six or ninety-six now. My grandmother is eighty, or will be in August. And they are coming to enjoy the Season, Bruce. Here. They are going to be staying here.”

Lord Bruce threw back his head and roared with laughter, a dripping cube of steak pierced by his fork halfway between the plate and his mouth.

“All the ladies will expire from envy when you drive them in the park, Arch,” he said. “This is going to be priceless. You must warn me when you are to take them there first. I would not miss it for a hundred of Annette’s girls.” 

“As far as that is concerned,” the duke said rather haughtily, “it is no great joke, Bruce, if you would care to stop guffawing and dripping blood over my tablecloth. Ladies do not become figures of fun merely because they have grown old; I am fond of my grandmother and would be of Aunt Sophie if she were not as deaf as a post but quite insistent on being involved in everyone’s conversation. No, what concerns me is that I am going to be a dead duck.” 

“Better than being a live one, old boy,” Lord Brace said with a chuckle. “You would not enjoy quacking your way through the rest of your life. I thought you had steeled your will to wedding and bedding the delectable Lady Phyllis. She is rather delectable, Arch. I have taken a good look at her since you began to lay siege.”

“I hate being rushed,” the duke said, scowling again. “I hate having my hand forced. I know just how it will be. As soon as my grandmother finds out which way the wind is blowing, there will be teas for the countess and Lady Phyllis and picnics with them and visits to the theater with them and doubtless a visit to Vauxhall with them. And while we are there, Grandmama will doubtless send the two of us down the darkest alley and stand guard at the end of it until the girl has been thoroughly kissed and proposed to. I’ll be betrothed before the month is out, Bruce.”

Lord Bruce shrugged. “You have my deepest commiserations, Arch,” he said. “But it is going to come sooner or later, is it not? It might as well be sooner, I suppose.”

“Not until Season’s end,” the duke said. “I want to be free at least until Season’s end.”

His friend looked at him with some interest. “Indeed?” he said. “You dark horse, Arch. You did not tell me that you have someone else on the mount already. No wonder you would not come to Annette’s. Who is she?”

“No one,” the duke said hastily. “You misunderstood me, Bruce.”

But his friend was grinning at him. “And you fear the old girls will stop you from enjoying her?” he said. “Poor Archie. But they cannot demand your company twenty-four hours a day, can they? Don’t old girls nod off with pleasing regularity? When do you, ah, exert yourself with her, Arch? Morning, afternoon, or night?”

“I told you you had misunderstood, Bruce,” the duke said, looking his friend sternly in the eye.

But Lord Bruce Ingram was not easily cowed. “If it is night, she is resident,” he said, gazing musingly up to the ceiling, the last piece of steak waving on his fork. “If it is daytime, she is not. Is she resident, Archie?”

“You are in danger of finding that fork embedded between your eyes,” the duke said quietly. “Have done, old fellow.”

“No, she would not be,” Lord Bruce said. “You would be all eagerness to share the news of your latest conquest if she were a courtesan. If she is not resident, of course, then she must be someone respectable. Someone of good ton. A married lady. Arch, Arch, you could be getting yourself into deep waters, old boy. Is she good? Who is she?”

“Put that disgusting piece of raw flesh into your mouth,” the Duke of Tenby, said, getting resolutely to his feet, “and swallow it, Bruce. We are going to Tattersall’s, as planned. And if you say another word”—he held up a staying hand as his friend opened his mouth to speak—“I shall ram it back down your throat with my fist.”

Lord Bruce ate the final piece of steak in philosophical silence, washed it down with the inch of ale that was left in his cup, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and got to his feet. “I shall find out for myself, anyway,” he said as if to himself as he followed the duke from the room. “All it needs is to remember every lady with whom you have conversed apart from Lady Phyllis since the Season began. There have not been many, have there, Arch? Indeed, I can think of only one below the age of forty. Interesting.” He chuckled.

The Duke of Tenby chose to ignore him.

He appeared not to be in a good mood. After his initial greeting when his coachman had lifted her into his carriage, he had sat in silence beside her all the way to his love nest staring gloomily out of the window. Except that the curtain had been drawn across it. Now, inside the bedchamber, he had drawn her hard against him and was undoing the buttons of her dress without kissing her or saying anything remotely tender. Almost as if she were no more than a body to him.

She was probably not.

She wished she had done what she had promised herself all weekend that she would do. She wished she had neglected to meet his carriage. It would be as easy as that to end the affair, she felt sure. He would not come after her if she did. She had been miserable with guilt for four days and even more miserable over the lies she was going to have to think up to tell Amanda on Monday afternoon. She did not want to continue the affair.

And yet it seemed that her body had become quite separate from either her mind or her emotions. And stronger than either. When Monday luncheon came and was over and Amanda had suggested a stroll in the park before it became too crowded, she had excused herself, claiming that she had promised to accompany Lady Beaconswood on a visit to another lady. She must not use Julia on Thursday too, she thought. She must think of another excuse for leaving home alone.

Her body had ached with the knowledge that it could be loved by him again during the afternoon, though she used the word “love” in her mind only because she did not know any of the coarser words that men knew. What would happen to her body had nothing to do with love. But she had known too that she would not be able to resist the temptation to continue the affair for at least one more afternoon. After all, it must become easier with time. She was not quite sure what she meant by it.

And so she was here, to find him silent and rather morose. He drew her dress and her chemise off her shoulders and down her arms, watching what he did, examining her breasts with cold, clinical eyes. There would be no romance, he had said. She had accepted that. But she had not realized that a sexual relationship might be entirely without—tenderness. Without any closeness at all beyond the physical.

“We are going to have to be doubly careful,” he said. “My grandmother and my aunt are coming to town tomorrow or Wednesday. I’ll not have my grandmother’s name sullied by any sort of scandal of mine.”

“What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “Climb onto Sir Clive’s roof and shout out the glad tidings?” The sarcasm in her voice shocked her. She was never sarcastic.

His silver eyes regarded her coldly. “Shrew,” he said quietly, his hands cupping her breasts. He removed his hands and set one at her back to guide her toward the bed.

She lay down and looked up at him as he undressed. His grandmother was coming? “She has been pleased by your news concerning Lady Phyllis?” she asked. “And is coming to see for herself?”

“I suspect that is her real reason,” he said, frowning. “She will try to hasten our betrothal. I don’t want it hastened. There are two months until the end of the Season. I want to be free to enjoy you during those months. Indeed, I will insist on doing so. But it will not be easy. She has a will of iron.”

So his bad mood had not been occasioned by any desire to end their affair almost before it had begun. Quite the contrary. He wanted to enjoy her for two months. Enjoy. There was no tenderness in the word. She did not know why she looked for any.

“But let’s not waste time,” he said. “These four days have been endless, Harriet. I am ravenous. Are you?”

“Yes.” She reached up her arms for him as he came down onto the bed beside her.

“I would kill to have you daily,” he said. “I hope you are prepared for an hour and a half of bodily pleasure.” His mouth came against hers. “That is what you are going to get.”

“Yes, Archie,” she said. “That is what I came for.”

It was not really, she discovered over the next hour and a half. She had come for sexual activity, of course. She was quite prepared to be honest with herself, since she knew there was no real excuse for her behavior. But even though she had known there would be no more, even though he had said so from the start and she had known he spoke the truth, she knew too that she had come looking for more. Hoping for more. For some affection, some tenderness, if not love. For some awareness of each other’s personhood. She wanted to know—she longed to know—that he was aware of her as Harriet.

He had promised an hour and a half of bodily pleasure, and that was precisely what he gave her. She realized today that the last time he had made allowances for her inexperience, her skittishness. Today he made no such allowances but made love with her—or made pleasure with her—with fierce demand for both her own response and his own release. The last time he had been prepared to treat her as a novice, allowing her to remain essentially passive except in her response. Today he began to teach her what he wanted, and demanded that she give it to him. And today he used new, more intimate touches on her and taught her different postures that could heighten sensation until she realized that the boundaries of pleasure could be pushed back to infinity and beyond.

There was not a moment for sleep and very few for relaxation. When he had said he was ravenous, he had spoken the truth. He took her as if he could not possibly have enough of her. And yet as she lay panting and damp against him at the end of the hour and a half, waiting for him to get up from the bed, she felt far, far away from him. There had been a sense of impersonality about everything that had happened between them on the bed. It had been a powerful and exhausting physical performance, something from which their real selves had stood back and hidden.

She closed her eyes. She longed for those selves to touch even if for just one moment. “Archie,” she whispered.

He lifted her chin with one hand and kissed her languidly and lingeringly. “Time to be up and on our way,” he said. “It was an adequate meal, Harriet? Your appetite has been satisfied?”

“Yes,” she said. It was true. Her body was satisfied and contented. “And yours?”

“Utterly,” he said. “Unfortunately I do not like having to go three or four days without any meal, at all, but there is nothing we can do about that, is there?” He pulled away from her, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and sat up to begin dressing. Harriet got out at the other side.

He kissed her before they left the room. “You really are very good, you know,” he said. “You learn fast and well. You are the best I have had, Harriet.”

She did not want to be the best. Being the best meant that she had been compared. She did not want to be compared. She wanted to be unique. How foolish! “I suppose,” she said with a smile, “you would not tell me if I were not would you?”

He kissed her hand and then watched as his coachman lifted her down from the carriage. As on the last occasion, she did not look back. He closed his eyes and set his head back against the cushions as the carriage moved on again. He was exhausted. He was going to have to sleep for an hour or two when he got home.

He swallowed and realized in some surprise that he was on the verge of tears. He could not remember when he had last cried. Certainly not at his grandfather’s death. Perhaps it was at his father’s. He could remember crying his heart out when his father was carried inside from a morning ride, his neck broken. And sniveling all through the funeral when he should have been comforting his mother and behaving like a man and a future duke—as his grandfather had pointed out to him sternly afterward and even emphasized with a cane swished painfully five times across his backside as he was bent over a desk. He did not believe he had cried since.

He was very much afraid that it had been a dreadful mistake. Not to change his mind about marrying her. He had done the right thing there. Marriage with Harriet would never have worked, not six years ago and not now. His mistake had been in beginning a liaison with her. It had seemed like a good idea and heaven knew he had desired her strongly enough. But it was not working. And yet it was far too late now to go back. What had happened was irreversible.

The trouble was that he could not seem to school himself into thinking of her only as a woman—only as a body to be enjoyed. He had just spent an hour and a half desperately trying to do just that, using her with a power and an energy that must have exhausted her strength almost beyond endurance. Three separate times—although there had been almost no interval between—he had wound up her desire and his own almost to breaking point and then pounded into her quite ruthlessly, denying both of them release until the tension could be borne not one second longer. He had played with her without tenderness or mercy, making pleasure an agony for her as well as for himself.

And yet he had failed in what he had tried to do. For every moment of that hour and a half she had been Harriet, his sweet, prim, grave, charming little blusher. Even though he had used her far more vigorously than he had ever used even the most hardened whore. She had been Harriet. And her body had done what her eyes had always done. It had given openly and candidly, reserving no secrets for itself.

Two months. That was what he had left with her if he could hold his grandmother at bay for that long. Two months during which to have enough of her, during which to begin to tire of her. It was bound to happen, was it not? Especially if he went at her with such vigor twice each week for those two months. It had to be long enough.

He knew it would not be nearly long enough.

He knew it would be far too long.

He loved her, now as always. He would still love her in July. And in July of next year. And ten years from now.