Say No to the Duke

by James, Eloisa

  “My great-aunt was a plucky gal,” the duchess said. “Rumor has it that her father tried to marry her to an older man, and she didn’t agree. So she put on breeches and snuck out of the house, meaning to make her way to Italy or some such.”

  “How romantic,” Lady Knowe said. “I gather she didn’t make it to a boat, or did she?”

  “Caught at the pier,” Her Grace said. “Hauled back and married off the next morning. Rumor has it she was tied to a bedpost all night to make certain that she didn’t escape, but my mother said that was apocryphal. She never liked my great-great-uncle, though, and we children considered him an ogre who might well have imprisoned his daughter, albeit temporarily.”

  “I don’t expect that their marriage was very happy,” Betsy said, which showed that she hadn’t been around le monde very long.

  “Oh, no, it was very happy,” the duchess said, sounding as surprised as Betsy was sorry. “Now if my great-aunt had scampered off to Italy with some black-haired conte, she likely would have been miserable. Not a good draught of ale in the whole country.”

  Betsy grinned at that, and Jeremy could practically see the duchess’s happiness blossom as she smiled back.

  They liked each other; Thaddeus and Betsy was a marriage made in heaven.

  “Beer is what saves a marriage,” the duchess said, spilling all her secrets before her son even had a ring on Betsy’s finger. “A good ale has often saved this country from rack and ruin at the hands of the idiots in Lords. The husbands go home at night, and their wives explain what they should do after they’re mellowed by a tankard of excellent beer.”

  “I could drink some ale,” Jeremy said, mostly to cover up the fact that Thaddeus still hadn’t said a word.

  Just then the coach began bouncing as the duke’s springs encountered the knobbly stones lining Wilmslow’s main street.

  “I wish I had more to contribute to a discussion of successful marriage,” Lady Knowe said, “but given my ignorance, and our impending arrival at the teahouse, I think we’ll have to postpone the conversation.”

  “We shall all go,” the duchess announced.

  “To tea? I should hope so,” Lady Knowe responded. She had clearly noticed Thaddeus’s silence. In fact, Jeremy had the sense that not much ever got past Lady Knowe. “I like ale, but it has its time and place.”

  “No, to the auction,” Her Grace said.

  She was smiling at Betsy as if she’d found a long-lost daughter. Perhaps she felt that way. Jeremy had the sudden realization that the duchess’s pink-clad barrel shape disguised a heart that would have loved to rampage about in breeches.

  “We will all go to the auction,” she continued. “Lady Boadicea can pose as one of my nephews a few times removed. I have hundreds of them.”

  “Unfortunately, not even duchesses are allowed to appear at the auction house in Wilmslow,” Lady Knowe said. “They have a rule keeping out ladies, which is frightfully old-fashioned.”

  “I could wear pantaloons,” the duchess remarked.

  “No, you couldn’t,” Lady Knowe retorted. “Your figure is unsuited to the task.”

  The duchess looked down thoughtfully at her plump hips. “I know an excellent tailor in London.”

  “Few men are shaped like a beehive,” Lady Knowe said, not unkindly. “My figure would not be flattered by breeches either. We’re like the girls in that Shakespeare play: One of them was a beanpole and the other was an acorn.”

  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Betsy supplied.

  Thaddeus still hadn’t said a word.

  The carriage door swung open. Her Grace rose to leave the carriage, taking the hand of a waiting groom, followed by Lady Knowe, and finally Betsy.

  Jeremy scowled at Thaddeus, who looked back at him with that imperturbable calm he’d affected ever since Eton. Yet Jeremy could see a tic near his eye.

  Thaddeus didn’t want a wife who fancied wearing breeches.

  How foolish.

  Jeremy didn’t want a wife, but for the sake of seeing Betsy in breeches, he’d marry the baker’s daughter.

  “Don’t make an ass of yourself,” he said. Though why he was helping Thaddeus in his courtship, he didn’t know.

  “I shall not,” Thaddeus stated.

  Others might have believed him, but Jeremy had his doubts. Thaddeus had always been obsessed by lineage. His father had drummed it into his head, the better to excuse himself for not marrying the woman of his heart.

  Old fool.

  By the time Jeremy left the carriage, Lady Knowe was already escorting the duchess into the teahouse. For her part, Betsy beamed up at Thaddeus with that sweetly biddable—and utterly dishonest, now Jeremy thought of it—expression with which she’d won over polite society.

  “Betsy,” Thaddeus said haltingly.

  Jeremy probably should leave the two of them to have this uncomfortable conversation in private, but instead he stayed where he was. His life had been sorely short of amusement lately.

  “Yes?” Betsy asked.

  “Perhaps you were joking about wearing breeches in public?”

  “No, I was not,” Betsy replied. Her charming smile widened.

  Thaddeus looked disconcerted. “Not a merry jest?”

  “I often wore breeches as a young girl. It is easier to ride horses astride,” Betsy informed him, making it worse.

  “I talked her into going to Wilmslow. She wanted to visit London and play billiards in White’s,” Jeremy said, feeling that he might as well chime in.

  Betsy was testing her future husband, and he was failing the test. Not fair, because Thaddeus was a decent fellow.

  “Come on, Betsy,” he said. “Tell him the truth: This is merely a taradiddle. You don’t plan to walk around your own house every day wearing breeches.”

  Betsy had her eyes fastened on Thaddeus’s face. “I might,” she stated. “In the privacy of my own house.”

  She was a minx who deserved to lose a dukedom.

  “Come along!” Lady Knowe cried from the door of the teahouse. She was prone to acting as if people were a flock of sheep, likely because she had been in charge of her brother’s nursery. There were eight Wilde offspring. Or was it twelve?

  The duchess appeared at her shoulder, like a plump duckling nestled beside its mother. “We have plans to make!” Her Grace called, with a surprisingly girlish laugh.

  Thaddeus moved toward his mother, so Jeremy held out his elbow to Betsy. This time he decided that her hair smelled like morning sunshine with a touch of river water.

  “The breeches were a stroke of genius, don’t you think?” Betsy whispered.

  Jeremy looked down into her laughing, naughty eyes and felt the world shaking around him and settling into a different shape. As happens in the midst of battle, when all of a sudden you realize the skirmish is lost.

  This battle had probably been lost from the beginning. He was beginning to suspect that mankind merely believed they governed their own affairs. Some embodiment of Fate, a deity with a sardonic humor, controlled them.

  Betsy poked him in the side. “Don’t you see what’s happened?”

  “What has happened?” Jeremy inquired.

  “The duchess would marry me now, except that we’re the wrong ages for each other and not the right gender and the rest of it.”

  “There are some serious barriers to that union,” he agreed.

  “Come along,” Betsy said, drawing him toward the teahouse. Whoever married her was clearly going to be herded about, since Betsy had learned her skills at Lady Knowe’s knee.

  Not the worst of all fates.

  In fact, when Betsy gave him a genuine smile and whispered, “I don’t believe that Thaddeus agrees with his mother,” Jeremy decided that perhaps the fates . . .

  Well.

  The teahouse was small, with a few tables angled in front of windows composed of leaded glass triangles. Lamps glowed on every table, and a large fire burned on the hearth. The air smelled like gingerbread and str
ong tea. Their hostess was a cheerful woman wearing a mob-cap embellished with four layers of ruffles.

  “I am so honored!” she cried, excitement making all her ruffles tremble.

  Likely, she collected prints of the Wilde family—as did most of England—since she was staring at Betsy with awe.

  “I’m so glad to be here,” Betsy said, with a warm smile. “Your gingerbread smells heavenly.”

  Jeremy frowned, struck by a thought. He could wander into any inn in the country and no one would have the faintest idea who he was. Perhaps there was more to Betsy’s wish to wear boy’s clothing than he had imagined.

  “Lady Boadicea, you must sit beside me,” the duchess called to Betsy. She had saved a seat between herself and her son.

  Jeremy sat beside Lady Knowe.

  “How charming these pink napkins are,” Her Grace said, shaking hers out.

  “Don’t you dare turn your linens as pink as your gowns,” Lady Knowe exclaimed. “My dear, when are you planning to drop all that pink? There is a moment when an affectation becomes a burden.”

  “It simplifies my life,” the duchess said, utterly unperturbed. “If I wore breeches, they would have to be pink.”

  “We already agreed that breeches are not for you,” Lady Knowe proclaimed.

  Her Grace snorted. “So you said, but I disagree. My coachman is a tremendously clever fellow; he can find me a pair and my maid will fit them to my shape.”

  Thaddeus’s mouth tightened, but his mother jumped to another topic.

  She began telling the table about their house in Bordeaux, from which she nimbly skipped to a discussion of the hall at Falconleigh, the seat of the duchy. The marble floors had been recently ground down. “His Grace insists on bringing a pack of bloodhounds with him into the study and they scratch the floors,” the duchess said, a distinct chill entering her voice.

  “I don’t suppose you have a dog,” Jeremy asked Thaddeus, doing his small part to impress the pleasures of ducal life upon Betsy.

  “I plan to have a pack someday,” Thaddeus said, showing the first spark of rebellion Jeremy had ever seen in the man.

  “He had a spaniel as a boy,” the duchess said. “It found its way into the butler’s pantry and chewed up all the polishing rags. Of course, when there are children in the house, we shall reconsider the situation. A boy ought to have a dog.”

  Betsy bore it all with a charming smile, and Jeremy had the distinct impression that Her Grace wasn’t the first mother to decide that Lady Boadicea would be a perfect mother for her unborn grandchildren.

  After a half hour, Thaddeus still had a guarded look in his eyes, but the duchess seemed to consider her job finished. She summoned a waiter and ascertained that there was an auction the very next afternoon.

  “Has anyone looked outside?” she asked. “It’s snowing. I suggest we spend the night in the inn and attend the auction tomorrow.”

  “I agree with you about spending the night,” Lady Knowe said. “I shall send the groom back to Lindow for our necessaries. Maids and the like.”

  “Those of us who wish to don male clothing tomorrow can attempt it,” the duchess said, ignoring the question of necessaries. She was patently uninterested in practicalities. “I may decide to go as myself.”

  “Women are not allowed in this particular auction house,” Betsy reminded her.

  “Nonsense. I have been to Christie’s several times. Quite likely they would have preferred the duke, but they certainly didn’t bar the door,” Her Grace said with a drop of scorn. “Don’t ever believe the word ‘no’ unless you say it yourself, dear. It makes life much more agreeable.”

  “While ladies may visit auction houses in London, it is different out here in the provinces,” Lady Knowe put in. “I’m afraid that Mr. Phillips has a strict policy against females. I was most annoyed when I learned of it.”

  That settled it; Her Grace was determined to visit Mr. Phillips’s auction house wearing breeches. “If they think I’m a woman, I dare them to say a word about it!” she declared.

  From there the conversation turned to a discussion of men’s clothing.

  Jeremy put a word into the conversation now and then, and kept an eye on Thaddeus, who courteously answered any question put to him directly, but spent most of his time brooding. This was familiar behavior from Eton; even at a young age, Thaddeus had to feel his way through an ethical problem before he reached a decision.

  At some point Thaddeus must have decided to marry a perfect lady, and Betsy was now proving to have uncomfortable edges to her. He apparently didn’t mind overlooking her adulterous mother, but breeches seemed to be a bridge too far.

  Jeremy felt a flash of disdain. His friend was hoping for bucolic bliss with an uninteresting wife and a passel of children and dogs.

  The duchess, meanwhile, seemed blissfully convinced that the only matter at hand was how to facilitate Betsy’s trip to the auction. “A wig will cover her hair, of course. You’d better instruct your butler to send a variety of them,” she advised Lady Knowe. “Footmen have such oddly shaped heads.”

  “That won’t work,” Jeremy objected.

  “Why not?” Betsy demanded.

  “You have too much hair for a small wig.” It was a simple fact. This morning it was caught up all over in loops and puffs. It stood out around her head in such profusion that a man could imagine it falling to her waist if she pulled out all the pins.

  He shifted, discreetly rearranging his breeches to make room for his reaction to that image.

  “We’ll braid her hair tightly,” Lady Knowe told him. “There are ways of keeping a wig on one’s scalp.”

  “When we’re in the Scottish house,” the duchess told Betsy, “I braid my hair and make the housemaids do theirs as well. Scotland is overrun by head lice.”

  Thankfully, teacakes, cream biscuits, and cucumber sandwiches arrived before that subject received more attention.

  Jeremy ate a surprising amount, given his customary lack of appetite, while trying very hard not to notice the pale skin of Betsy’s wrists. Why should a wrist be erotic, after all?

  And yet it was.

  If he had his way, he’d run his tongue around that creamy skin and cover it with little bites, lick his way to her palm, wrap his lips around one finger . . .

  He came back to himself with a jolt, realizing that the party was looking at him expectantly. “Yes?”

  “Thaddeus is going to escort Lady Knowe and myself to the auction house so we can spy around the premises,” the duchess told him. “We don’t think that Lady Boadicea should be seen in the vicinity, so the two of you must wait for us to return. If she is seen in our company, they might suspect who she is tomorrow when we return.”

  If he were Thaddeus, he wouldn’t leave his fiancée in the care of another man.

  But he wasn’t Thaddeus, and Thaddeus seemed perfectly agreeable about the prospect of losing the company of his supposed beloved.

  “He doesn’t want to marry me anymore,” Betsy said a few minutes later, after the party left. She didn’t sound disappointed.

  “You could have been a duchess,” Jeremy said. “Actually, you probably will still be a duchess, because Thaddeus’s mother wants you, even if Thaddeus doesn’t. You’re going to be permitted, if not goaded into, all the pranks that she wasn’t allowed as a child.”

  “No one will goad me into anything,” Betsy said, finishing her last bite of crumpet. “Where shall we go, by the way? Not that I don’t enjoy your company, but I hate sitting in front of crumbly plates. It’s so depressing.”

  “I would suggest a visit to St. Bartholomew’s,” the hostess suggested, appearing with Betsy’s pelisse over her arm. “Your Ladyship will find it pleasing. It has a turreted bell tower and an ancient crypt, and dates to the 1600s.”

  Jeremy kept his utter disinterest in turreted bell towers to himself, took the pelisse from the woman, and helped Betsy put it on. “Do you suppose your future mother-in-law thought about the fact
that she’d left you unchaperoned?” he asked.

  “Should she have?” Betsy asked, looking up at him.

  “Certainly not,” Jeremy said. “I’m as safe as a toothless dog and they know it.”

  A smile glimmered in the depths of Betsy’s eyes.

  He wasn’t . . . and she knew it. For a moment the air between them sang with a promise of purely earthly delights. The kind that keep a man and woman in their room for hours, contemplating an effort to rise and then collapsing back into bed.

  There were reasons why young women weren’t allowed to spend time alone with men unless betrothed or married.

  “I like her for it,” Betsy said, unexpectedly. “There are many who expect me to be as immoral as my mother. That prospect didn’t even cross her mind, did it?”

  “No,” Jeremy said. “The duchess has come to an orderly conclusion about you and her son, and she can’t conceive that you might prefer another man.”

  There was a funny little silence after that.

  “Shall we tour St. Bartholomew’s?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Betsy replied, taking his arm. On the doorstep she paused and pulled up the hood of her pelisse.

  The snowfall was thicker than it seemed from the teahouse windows. Through a veil of white, the town looked bleak and dark. Wilmslow was an old town, with narrow streets that wove back and forth, cobbles curving around a massive oak tree.

  “You are certain that you don’t wish to return to the teahouse?” he asked Betsy. “We could ask to have the plates cleared. We could start over with fresh crumpets and tea.”

  “I’m sorry to drag you through the snow,” she said, “but I couldn’t take another moment. Did you notice the hostess staring at me from the side of the room?”

  “It did occur to me that she might have collected a print or two of the Wildes,” Jeremy admitted cautiously.

  “If I marry Thaddeus, she will begin collecting prints of duchesses,” Betsy said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Perhaps I am being obtuse, but how are you injured if she wastes her money on prints of you posing in a ballroom?”

  “You haven’t made a study of Wilde prints, obviously.”

  “True.”