“What do you think?” Joan said, pulling the point of the black hat low over her eyes and turning to Thaddeus.
To her surprise, he had a dusky color in his cheeks and he looked . . . something.
“What?” she demanded.
“Nothing.”
She glanced behind her, and then froze. Her back was clearly visible in the glass. The green coat clung to her narrow shoulders—and ended in a boyish flounce at her hips. Which left her silken-clad, round bottom open to view.
“Oh.”
He nodded. Arms folded over his chest again, Thaddeus’s eyes glinted at her. “See what I mean?”
Joan squinted at him and twirled her finger.
He didn’t move.
She sighed and walked around to his rear. His frock coat was made of the finest wool, naturally. It strained over his broad shoulders, and then followed the line of his back in two precisely stitched lines that emphasized his lean waist. At that point the coat spilled into disciplined pleats hanging to his knees, so his arse wasn’t exposed for the world to see.
“All right,” she said, feeling suddenly as if she were half naked. “I take your point.”
“Also, that hat is too large for you. Gentlemen’s hats are made for the shape of their head. One doesn’t buy them in a fair.”
Joan sighed and edged around until her bottom was hidden by a table piled with hats. She took off the macaroni hat and put it to the side, picking up Alaric’s old one again.
“I’ve chosen three hats,” Aunt Knowe said gaily, coming over to them. “Nothing for you, my dear? Thaddeus, your mother is contemplating buying a pink hat, although I told her she has enough pink headgear to last out the century.”
He gave her a wry smile. “My mother adores the color.”
“That is not news to me,” Aunt Knowe said tartly. “I’ve known Emily since she was a girl, when her affection for the color was charming.”
Thaddeus raised an eyebrow. “It still is.”
Not many people dared to reprimand Lady Knowe, twin sister of the Duke of Lindow. Joan watched with fascination as her aunt barked with laughter. “You raised your son well,” she called over her shoulder.
The duchess smiled widely. “I believe I’ll have these two, Thaddeus, dear. What do you think? This good man has silk roses in the back and tells me that it would be the work of a moment to change the violets to pink roses.”
“Certainly,” Thaddeus said. He nodded to the happy stall keeper and took out his purse. “These two, and three for Lady Knowe.”
“Mine too,” Otis cried. “You know that scene when Ophelia is tossing flowers around the throne room? It will make far more sense if I’m wearing this hat!”
The brim of the hat was topped by a huge puff of cherry-striped fabric adorned with a profusion of multicolored posies, a good many ribbons, large bows, and six curly ruby-colored feathers. It was easily twice the width of Otis’s head, even given his gooseberry wig.
“To be sure,” Thaddeus said, his expression not changing.
Joan began giggling. Something about the combination of Otis’s homely face topped by so many flowers and flounces was irresistibly funny.
Otis narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“You look like an animated mushroom!”
“Only if a window box fell onto the mushroom,” Aunt Knowe put in, huffing with laughter.
“This is my finest hat, straight from Paris,” the stall keeper protested. “The young lady has exquisite taste.”
Aunt Knowe and Joan laughed even harder.
Otis fixed them with a glare, caught sight of himself in the glass, and broke into a reluctant smile.
The duchess cocked her head and said thoughtfully, “I think you look like a fancy chicken that I once saw at the Tower of London.”
“I shall wear it home to the castle and directly pay a visit to the nursery,” Otis said airily. “I don’t want to deny anyone the pleasure of seeing the fanciest chicken who ever pranced through Drabblefield Fair.”
They were walking back to the carriage, laden down with everything from pears to a baby rattle for Viola’s unborn child, six cutwork handkerchiefs, and a great quantity of gingerbread, when Thaddeus said to Joan, “To return to our previous subject of conversation, I am not melancholy.”
“Then why do I feel as if I should mark on a calendar every time you laugh?” she asked. “On the rare occasions when you do laugh, I mean.”
She had the hang of striding now. Swinging one’s arms was important too. In fact, being a man was an all-body endeavor.
“I suppose you laugh many times a day?” There wasn’t anything wistful about Thaddeus’s voice; it had the same pleasant, courtly timbre as always.
“Of course,” Joan said.
“Joan is a great laugher,” Aunt Knowe said from behind them. “The boys used to adore making her giggle long before she could speak a word. The nursery would have been much less jolly without her.”
“As polite society will be if anyone catches sight of you in that coat,” Otis said, poking Joan in the back. “I don’t think it’s appropriate. I hadn’t caught sight of you from the rear before.”
Joan felt herself turning pink. “Lord Greywick has already expressed his opinion of my coat. I know it’s too short.”
“He’s right,” Otis said firmly. “Just think of that scene in which you have to wave a dagger about. Is this a dagger that I see before me?”
“Wrong play!” Joan cried, turning around and walking backward because she felt so self-conscious. “That’s Macbeth.”
“Hamlet waves around a rapier in Act Five, when he’s dueling everyone, right? My point is that the audience is going to be watching your arse instead of the dagger,” Otis said.
“You shouldn’t mention private parts in front of ladies!” Aunt Knowe exclaimed.
Thaddeus mumbled something.
Joan looked up. “What did you say?”
Their eyes met, and she felt herself growing even pinker.
Aunt Knowe was bickering with Otis and not listening.
“I don’t read much Shakespeare,” Thaddeus said, a shade of apology in his voice.
Joan waved her hand. “Most of my family agrees with your poor opinion of the Bard.”
“I said that your arse might make that wretched play palatable,” he said, his voice low but perfectly clear.
Joan’s mouth fell open.
“Not that you will ever wear that coat in public again,” the viscount decreed.
Chapter Seven
On return from the fair, Thaddeus stripped, tossing his garments on a chair and stepping into the bath his valet had prepared.
“Your clothes are filthy,” Pitcher said with distaste. “If you’ll forgive me, my lord, I’ll take them directly to the laundry.” He bundled them and then wielded a feather duster on the chair.
Thaddeus relaxed into the steaming tub with a sigh of relief, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling. He had eaten many meals in company with the Duke of Lindow’s family. He had played billiards with the duke’s sons in the middle of the night; he had gone sledding with the children and trounced the duchess at archery. He had attended balls and country house parties.
Lindow wasn’t home, but it wasn’t foreign to him either. He’d always been comfortable there, knowing his place and feeling among friends.
No longer.
Now he felt as if he were in the grip of emotion—a condition he detested—and what’s worse, he wasn’t even certain what the emotion was. One moment he was angry, and the next he found himself with a cockstand such as he had scarcely experienced in his life, which would not go away, no matter how hard he contemplated the plight of the poor or the hairy wart on his late grandmother’s chin.
Joan was the obvious catalyst.
She kept looking into his eyes, as if she guessed the feelings he had hidden from everyone, including himself.
Not to mention that kiss.
Bloody hell.
He had looked down at Joan and realized that she’d taken his refusal to answer her question as confirmation that he disliked her—and completely lost his head. Even the memory of that kiss made a rush of lust overcome him with the ferocity of a wildfire.
Given another half hour, he would have propped her against that wretched fence and lost his head entirely.
God help him, when she was trying on a hat with that impudent smile, he actually glanced at the thicket and contemplated ducking behind it accompanied by a lady dressed as a man and kissing that lady to a standstill.
It was even worse after Joan peered at her bottom and then turned to him with a flush in her cheeks. All he could think about was what she would look like after coming in his arms.
He wasn’t the sort of man who was ever taken by surprise by lust. Desire had its place; he enjoyed respectful exchanges with women who cheerfully welcomed him into their beds with no expectation of money or a future.
Picturing intimacies with one of them had never caused him to shudder so deeply that he felt it in his backbone.
He felt unmoored.
It took an effort of will to admit that he had fallen under the spell of a woman who had been practicing her wiles on London society for three years. He had watched Joan do it. He knew what an amazing performance she put on.
That poor dupe, Anthony Froude, had told him months after Joan kissed him at the ball that he’d never be happy with another woman.
Succumbing to her, kissing her, made him as foolish as Anthony.
He shook his head and reached for a ball of lemon soap—which put him in a direct eye line with a glass that hung over the dressing table. He watched himself run the ball over his arms and chest, soapy water sliding over his muscles.
He’d never given any thought to whether his future wife would dislike his burly frame. It hadn’t mattered, to be frank. But now he wondered what Joan would think. Several times he’d caught her peeking at his chest.
Irritatingly, his veins were on fire, unable to stop imagining her as a lover. He had a feeling she’d be nothing like the women he’d made love to over the years.
He could imagine her: sweaty, bossy, sparkling, requesting more than he wanted to give, and getting it. She would demand more of him than any woman had before. Not that he’d left a woman unsatisfied.
But it would be different with her.
He rubbed soap in his hair, watching his biceps bulge in the glass. He hadn’t realized how muscled he’d become, even given Lady Bumtrinket’s unwelcome comments about his supposedly padded frame.
The pinnacle of gentlemanly form was a slender man, graceful in the ballroom, willowy and aristocratic.
In the last two years, he’d repeatedly taken out deep frustration in the boxing salon, and his body had changed, growing thicker and more masculine, for want of a better word. More rugged, as befit someone who walked in the door of the salon six days of the week and paid for the privilege of pummeling the strongest men in London.
Sinking back under the water, he rinsed the soap from his hair and braced his hands on the sides of the tub. It was time to rise, to put on the garments and the comportment of a viscount bade to dinner in a castle, in company with a duke and two duchesses, one of whom was his mother.
As well as Lady Joan.
The image of her flickered in his mind, and he let out a groan before he slid back down into the tub, and watched his right hand slide down his wet chest and disappear under the sudsy water.
The moment he took hold of his cock, his head arched backward, and a rough sound broke from his lips.
Five minutes later he was forced to accept an unpalatable truth: The orgasm that tore through him like fire, that convulsed his body, had left him unsatisfied. Perhaps, like poor Anthony Froude, he would never be satisfied again.
At least, not by his own hand.
An hour later, he escorted his mother into the drawing room and discovered Joan standing before the great fireplace, reciting one of Hamlet’s soliloquies to an audience of her parents.
Except she’d mixed up the skull and the soliloquy. Joan was talking to a skull—albeit a stuffed one—but it wasn’t human. In fact, it had originally belonged to an alligator, given its pronounced snout. He recognized it as part of the stuffed alligator that normally resided in a corner of the drawing room after having been sent home, as he understood it, by the famous explorer Lord Alaric Wilde, though he hadn’t realized that the head could separate from its body.
The alligator’s eyes had been replaced by shiny green marbles, and his jaw hung open in a way that made him look as if he were laughing.
As Thaddeus remembered, Hamlet’s speech addressed to a skull was about the brevity of fame. But Joan was performing To be or not to be, and the way she was talking to the alligator had the duke and duchess in gales of laughter. Instead of delivering a profound treatise on suicide, Joan was poking fun at a rich and privileged prince, absurdly self-indulgent in his moaning.
“Oh, my goodness,” Thaddeus’s mother whispered, bringing him to a halt. “Let’s not interrupt her! I’d have never thought Hamlet could be funny.”
“Neither had I,” he said.
Joan’s low bodice framed breasts so plump and delicious that his knees felt weak at the sight—and yet, at this moment, she was a man.
Not any man: a prince. She was dressed as a woman, but her expressive face was that of an arrogant young man indulging himself with long-winded speeches.
The duke and duchess stood with their backs to Thaddeus and his mother. His Grace, the Duke of Lindow, was a tall, well-built man who carried his years lightly. His duchess was smaller, tucked under his arm. The soliloquy over, they both clapped wildly.
“Brava!” His Grace said, still chuckling.
“The most enjoyable Hamlet I’ve seen!” the duchess crowed.
Thaddeus and his mother began to walk toward them.
He felt like a moth drawn to a flame. It was a disconcerting feeling because—he reminded himself—he didn’t like Joan as a person. She was reckless. Scandalous. Her attitude toward Percy Piglet hadn’t made a difference in those essential traits.
“You were brilliant,” the Duke of Lindow told his daughter. “But I still don’t understand: Why Hamlet? Why not perform one of the great comedies? You stripped that prince to the bone; your version is an extremely foolish, funny prig.”
“I’ll be serious in performance,” Joan promised, leaning back against the stone of the unlit fireplace. “I chose Hamlet because the play has everything in it: tragedy, deaths, disclosures, ghosts, love and despair, illusion and disguise. Not too much comedy, but I couldn’t resist it tonight.”
Her eyes landed on Thaddeus’s mother, and she suddenly threw off Hamlet and became a young lady. “Your Grace,” she said, stepping forward to drop into a graceful curtsy. “Lord Greywick. Good evening.”
The duke and duchess turned to greet them. Sometime later, Thaddeus found himself seated beside Joan on a small settee.
No, he seated himself beside her. She hadn’t given him even an inviting glance. It was as if they had never kissed.
Which was precisely what he wanted, of course.
“Champagne, Prism,” the duke said, nodding to the castle butler.
“Where is the rest of the family?” Joan asked.
“Devin will eat with Viola, who can’t bear the idea of dressing for the evening meal,” her mother said. “The children are in the nursery, exhausted by an afternoon at the fair. I’m not sure where Aunt Knowe or Otis can be found.”
“Otis is always late,” Joan remarked. “It’s a habit of mind. I know he was only a vicar for two weeks, but I’d bet my dowry that church services, even weddings, never began on time.”
“I have so many children, and yet the castle seems terribly thin of company,” the duke said, accepting a glass of champagne from the butler.
His wife smiled at him and took his hand. “You are never happier than when all are safely in the castle
.” Then she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “We all wish that Horatius could be here as well.”
It took Thaddeus a moment to remember that Horatius was the duke’s eldest son, who had died in an accident in the bog east of the castle. “I knew the Marquess of Saltersley when I was a schoolboy,” he said. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
His Grace threw back his champagne, and a footman stepped forward instantly to refill his glass. “He was a troublesome heir, pompous and always right. One of the last things he said to me was that I should spend more time in Parliament, and dig more canals. Who would want to be around an heir who was convinced he would make the better duke?”
“You,” his wife said affectionately, kissing him on the cheek. “We all would. I knew Horatius for only seven years, but he was deeply lovable, no matter how bombastic.”
Thaddeus’s mother straightened. “It’s the anniversary of his death, isn’t it?” she exclaimed. “I’m so sorry, my dears. If I had realized, I would have delayed our arrival.”
“He’s been lost to us for a long time,” the duke said. “He died eleven years ago, in ’73. I took a long walk in the Moss today to commemorate him.” Lindow Moss was the bog where Horatius drowned.
“I think we should be very grateful that Horatius isn’t haunting the castle bellowing Remember me like Hamlet’s father,” Joan said, injecting just the right amount of humor into her voice. “He would frighten us to death. He was brilliant at playing pirates. Some of my earliest memories are the happy afternoons when he would come to the nursery and act out long adventure stories. Sometimes he would take us out to search for treasure.”
“That’s right,” the duke said. “He was obsessed with the lost treasure, wasn’t he?” He turned to Thaddeus and his mother. “One of my ancestors was besieged by Oswald of Northumbria back in the 600s. Family lore has it that he took a fortune in silver and buried it.”
“Not buried it,” Joan corrected. “He sank it. That means either the bog or the lake.”
“The boys used to dive in the lake,” the duke said. “There’s nothing there: It’s a shallow lake that my great-grandfather widened into a circle, turning its island into a garden retreat.”
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