When the Duke Returns(7)

“Because of the title, you mean?”

“Precisely. Let’s hope he’ll stay around long enough to create an heir, and then he can wander off for a decade or so.”

Isidore got up, walked a few nervous steps before she blurted out her darkest fear. “If he’s capable of making an heir.”

“If he’s not, then you know what you have to do. Your first duty to the title is to produce an heir, and if the duke isn’t capable, then you find a man to do the deed. That’s a fact of life.”

“Speaking of that,” Isidore said, “didn’t you move back to England precisely to give Beaumont an heir?”

“Beaumont doesn’t want to engage in heir-making activities until I finish the chess match I started with the Duke of Villiers. But Villiers is still recovering from brain fever and his doctor won’t allow him to play chess. Which is actually a good thing.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Beaumont and I are getting to know each other,” Jemma said lightly.

“And yet not intimately?”

Jemma started laughing. “You would put up with the warm blood, the orgies, and the unpowdered hair, if only your husband would take you to bed, Isidore. Isn’t that the truth?”

Isidore felt a pulse of humiliation, but after all, Jemma was her dearest friend. “I’m twenty-three,” she said. “Twenty-three! I’m curious! You should see the way Harriet acts with Lord Strange when they think no one is looking. I came across them kissing in a corridor, and the air fairly scorched around them.”

“Poor Isidore,” Jemma said, meaning it. “Though I feel compelled to tell you that the whole bedroom experience is rather overrated, in my opinion.”

“It would have been easier if Cosway expressed the slightest interest in the occasion. At this rate, I’m going to terrify the man if we ever get to a bedchamber.” She took another nervous turn around the chamber.

“I think you should probably prepare for the worst,” Jemma said. “It seems very likely to me that incapability lies at the heart of this situation. It would explain why he’s a virgin, and also why he’s making such a fuss out of the wedding.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Another wedding delays the inevitable. Perhaps he’s thinking that although he may not have functioned in previous attempts—”

“Sharing a cup of warm blood will make it all better?” Isidore couldn’t help it. She started laughing again, a kind of laughter halfway between joy and despair.

“Yes,” Jemma said. “That sounds just like something a man would think up.”





Chapter Two




Revels House

Country Seat of the Duke of Cosway

February 21, 1784

Simeon Jermyn, Duke of Cosway, expected to feel an overwhelming tide of emotion when his carriage drew up before Revels House. After all, he hadn’t seen his childhood home in well over ten years. He arrived just before twilight, when the lowering sun made every turret and angle (and Revels House had many) look sharp and clear against the fading blue sky.

Of course he was poised to quell any such unwelcome emotion. As a follower of the Middle Way, he understood that to live in peace was to anticipate the danger of chaos. Revels House reeked of chaos: even as a mere child he had longed to escape his parents’ pitched battles, his father’s frenzied speeches, his mother’s fierce claims of privilege. They sent him to Eton, but that meant that he had free access to a library full of books describing countries unlike his own. Families unlike his own.

Of course, it was possible that when he came home to the sleepy, tamed English countryside, with Revels House sitting in the midst like a plump teapot, he would be overcome by a sense of righteous pride.

But instead of pride, he found himself looking at the fields as they drew closer and marking their neglected appearance. The gravel on the long drive wasn’t just unraked; great swaths of the road were nothing more than ruts carved from dry mud. The trees hadn’t been pollarded in years.

Instead of pride—or joy—he felt an unwelcome prickle of guilt, which intensified as he climbed from the carriage to find a broken window in the east wing, and bricks that badly needed pointing.

At least Honeydew, the family’s butler, looked the same. For a moment it felt as if Simeon had never left home. Honeydew’s three-tiered wig still ended in a stubby tail in the back; his frock was cut in the style of twenty years ago, and lined with brass buttons. Only his face had changed: years ago, Honeydew had a youngish, mournful face, from which his nose jutted like some sort of miserable mistake. Now Honeydew had an older, mournful face. It suited him. He used to look like a boy who had unexpectedly discovered a dead body; now he looked like a man who had judged life and found it wanting.