When the Duke Returns(8)

A moment later Simeon walked into his mother’s sitting room. Some of his earliest memories involved interminable lectures delivered in this room. His mother believed in driving her points home with enthusiasm—and repetition. On one occasion she had taken a full hour to inform him that a gentleman does not curl his lip at a portrait of an ancestor. Even if the said ancestor looked like a silly booby in a ridiculous frill.

Like Honeydew, the Dowager Duchess looked the same…and yet not the same.

She sat bolt upright on a settee, her skirts occupying whatever space was not taken up by her bottom. He knew little of current women’s fashions, though styles had obviously changed since he left England. Yet his mother seemed to be wearing clothing from twenty years ago.

She rose and he saw her embroidered bodice, decorated with a ladder of bows down the front, and revised his estimation: more than twenty years ago. In truth, her costume was precisely as he remembered, from her tall white linen cap to her train. It was only her face that had changed. He remembered her bursting with authority and life, her rosy cheeks and sharp eyes epitomizing the model of duchess-as-general. But now she looked wrinkled and surprised, like an apple gone soft after a winter in the cellar. She looked old.

She extended a hand. He fell to one knee and kissed her beringed finger. “Cosway,” she said. “I trust that you recovered your wife from that den of iniquity.” He had arrived in London to find alarmed letters directing him to travel immediately to a country house party to rescue Isidore. Which he had done.

“Mother, I missed you these twelve years,” he said.

Her eyes sharpened and he saw a trace of the woman he remembered, one who abhorred any display of emotion other than disdain and disappointment.

“Indeed,” she said, her voice glacial. Then he remembered how many hundreds—nay thousands—of his comments had been received with that single, damning word. “You will forgive me for doubting your word, since you were at liberty to return at any time.”

It was a fair point. “On receiving your note,” he offered by way of amelioration, “I traveled to Fonthill. My wife was perfectly fit.” He paused for a moment, wondering if he was supposed to report on the state of his bride’s virginity.

“I trust you both left the environs immediately.”

She folded her hands together. It was almost impossible to see her knuckles due to the flare of jewels. He remembered that about his mother too: she was like a magpie in her delight in shiny things, jewels, gold, silver.

He nodded.

“Where is the duchess? She should be here with you. Your responsibilities to the Cosway line of descent have been sadly neglected.”

Simeon couldn’t help wondering if his mother intended to monitor how often he visited his wife’s bedchamber. “Isidore is in London. She will remain there while I prepare a wedding celebration.”

“Wedding! You are married; what need have you for a wedding?”

“We were married by proxy. I should like to celebrate our vows properly.”

“Stuff and humbug!” his mother snapped. “That’s one and same with those other romantic notions with which you always stuffed your head! Rubbish!”

“Isidore agrees with you.”

“Isidore? Isidore? Who is Isidore? Are you, by any chance, referring to your wife, the Duchess of Cosway, by her personal name?”

“Yes.”

“Indeed.”

Now they were on familiar ground. The groundswell of a lecture rolled toward him. He sat down, remembering a second too late that he should have asked her permission.

But he settled back into his chair rather than spring to his feet. The lecture, which began with his impertinent behavior in referring to his wife by her given name and deviated into the disgraceful, un-English nature of that name (Isidore), swelled like a river in springtime, giving him time to catalog perplexing aspects of his return.

His mother was brilliantly dressed in figured silk. But her chamber had faded, the hangings and upholstery apparently not having been touched since long before his father died three years ago. The house didn’t even smell good. There was an underlying miasma that hinted of the privy. Had no one noticed?

He would have returned to England sooner, had there been a problem with money. His solicitor forwarded the estate summary every year and at no time did it indicate a shortage of funds to furbish the house, to pollard the trees, or to keep the fields in good trim.

It was a long hour.





Chapter Three




Revels House

February 22, 1784

“Where are you going dressed like that?” The Dowager Duchess of Cosway was no stranger to a shriek, but on this occasion she excelled. Any reasonable elephant would have stampeded.