When the Duke Returns(47)

“You chose me due to the dowry my father offered,” Isidore put in. She was starting to feel a rising wave of fury. How could a mother speak about her son in such withering terms? True, Simeon was unusual, but—

“He promised you were a biddable girl,” her mother-in-law said crushingly.

“He was mistaken,” Isidore said, showing her teeth in an approximation of a smile.

“I realized that the moment I saw you,” the duchess said. “Only twelve years old, and as saucy as a lower housemaid. I thought then that it would fall apart before the wedding and likely it would have but for my son’s refusal to return to England. Of course he was suffering from brain fever.”

“He didn’t have brain fever,” Isidore said.

“Put your gloves back on!” the duchess barked. “No duchess would show her ungloved hands in public. I can see that making you into proper duchess material is going to be as hard as bundling my son into acceptable shape.”

“Your son is more than acceptable,” Isidore said, placing her gloves on the table before her with some precision.

It was a signal of war. The duchess, who had up till now resembled an elderly bulldog, suddenly straightened and took on the air of a mastiff. “I foresee the long lineage of the Cosways dragged into the dirt.”

Isidore smiled kindly at her. “I will do my very best to get the dirt out of this room, not to mention this house, which smells worse than most slums.”

“A duchess does not lower herself to such inconsequential matters.”

“Your—and I use the word advisedly—your house looks like the tumble-down shack owned by an impoverished peasant. The house stinks like a privy, the furniture is falling apart, and the servants haven’t been paid. I may not have been raised by a duke, but my father would have been ashamed to treat his dependents as you have routinely treated your staff.”

She paused, but the duchess didn’t seem ready to take up her side of the argument yet, so Isidore continued. “My father would also have been ashamed to allow the house of his forefathers to fall into such disrepair.”

“It is not in disrepair,” the duchess said, her voice a growl. “There might be a piece of rackety furniture here and there that could use repair, but problems with the—”

But Isidore was just beginning. “Broken windows,” she said. “Warped wood that will need to be replaced. The chimney in the west wing seems to have toppled in on itself, from what I could see. My father, Your Grace, would call it a disgrace!”

Silence followed.

Her mother-in-law was red in the face and seemed to have blown up slightly, as a frog does before croaking. Isidore reached out and picked up her gloves. “You might be more comfortable retiring to your chambers,” she said, her voice even. “All the furniture in the downstairs rooms will be removed in the next few hours and sent to London for refurbishing or replacement.”

That goaded the duchess into speech. “By whose authority do you dare that action!” she shouted.

Isidore stood. “By my own.” She pulled on her gloves, snapping them onto each finger. “That of the Duchess of Cosway.”

“You’ll bankrupt the estate!”

“Nonsense. The Cosway estate is one of the richest in the kingdom, and even if it were not so, I inherited my father’s entire estate. I, Your Grace, am likely the richest woman in this kingdom, barring their royal highnesses. Not to mention the fact that your son brought back a fortune in tiger rubies from Africa. If we wish to gild this entire house so that they can see the glow from London, we can afford to do so.”

“So that’s the way of the world! The young waste the substance that the elderly worked so hard to build up, on fripperies, trivialities, gilded walls…”

“In this case,” Isidore said briskly, “the young make a necessary outlay of funds to repair the neglect and damage by the uncaring—”

“Don’t you call me uncaring!” the duchess said, leaping to her feet with a great creaking of corsets. “I may not have thought that the broken window was terribly important, and I certainly never prided myself on being one of the richest women in the kingdom, the way you do, but I cared for this estate. I love it. It’s—”

She turned, very precisely, and walked from the room, closing the door behind her.

“Oh…hell,” Isidore said. Obviously she had bungled that. “It’s my temper,” she said out loud, staring down at her gloves.

The door opened again to Honeydew, ushering in a bevy of strong-looking men. “If Your Grace would help us select furniture for the cart, that would be most kind.”