by Regina Darcy
“Splendid, as all your paintings are. I am loathe to part with any of them, but your fame seems to outpace the speed with which you are able to satisfy your following.”
The Earl had been delighted to plan their honeymoon around the locations of the world’s finest collections of art. The newlyweds had returned to England from a honeymoon spent in Italy, France, and Spain, where the Earl escorted his artist wife, as he put it, from canvas to frame. Both had been eager to return to England and to Devon, where Hemsworth Hall was about to acquire an artist’s studio in an unused wing of the stately manor. Great-Aunt Agatha, who had thrilled to the exciting story of their meeting and was quite proud of having an artist in the family, had been put in charge of the building arrangements while the Earl and Gemma toured Europe.
Now that they were back, she had been making rather unsubtle hints about children. She had charged the workers with giving the Hemsworth Hall nursery what she called “just a bit of paint.” The Earl and Gemma had merely smiled when they surveyed the results, the Earl agreeing that it was a far cry better than the grim room he remembered.
“We’d better go down now,” Gemma said. “Great-Aunt Agatha doesn’t like us to be late.”
“Umm,” the Earl answered, his lips hovering over the earlobe from which the dab of paint had been removed.
“Shouldn’t we tell her?”
“And deprive ourselves of the amusement she affords with her daily reminders about the Fitzsimmons line, the earldom, her mortality, and our duty to England?”
Gemma laughed. She had found being a countess to be much simpler than she had expected, chiefly because of the Earl and his aunt. The Earl made no attempt to disguise his passion for her. Great-Aunt Agatha was in such euphoria that he had married a woman of courage and spirit that she had been heard to brag to the dowagers of the beau monde that what was missing in England’s upper-class was a good dose of new blood. Far from being scandalised by Gemma’s modest upbringing, her artistic talent, or her exploits on behalf of the Crown, Great-Aunt Agatha lost no opportunity to salute her grandnephew’s discernment in choosing a wife.
“I think we must tell her,” Gemma insisted. “Let’s not wait, Charles. If we tarry much longer, she will begin to think I’m putting on weight, and she will tell Cook to change the menus.”
The Earl laughed. “You are the lady of the manor, not Aunt Agatha. She would not trespass upon your terrain.”
“I’m quite glad that she is so adept at managing the household. It gives me more time to paint.”
The Earl wrapped his arms around her, his hand touching the gentle curve of her abdomen which was only just beginning to reveal that the Fitzsimmons line was due to welcome an heir in the spring.
“The Prince Regent will want to be godfather, of course,” the Earl said.
“He has been very kind to me, despite the fact that I come from such an ordinary background.”
“His Highness does not regard ancestry as significant when it is superseded by beauty. He lost no time in putting your uncle in his place when Lord Benton attempted to trade upon your rank.”
“I do admit, although I should not, that seeing Lord Benton cut by Aunt Agatha was a rare delight. Am I not dreadful?”
“Dreadful? Indeed you are. Had his lordship not expelled you from his house, you would not have sought refuge under Westminster Bridge, and you and I would never have been reunited.”
“From that line of reasoning, we should ask the thief who tried to rob me if he would like to be godfather to our child.”
The Earl laughed. “We owe the Fates a rare debt,” he said. “From robbery, abduction, and attempted assassination comes a love affair to rival anything in poetry or story. It’s quite a feat for the Fitzsimmons heir to live up to.”
“I have every confidence that our son or daughter will manage beautifully,” Gemma said.
The Earl held her close. “Great-Aunt Agatha will see to it,” he vowed.
The End
BONUS CHAPTER 1:
THE BUESTOCKING & THE VISCOUNT (also part of 15 story box set)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The king was dead. The reign that began in 1760 when George III was a young man of twenty came to an end in 1820 when the king, whose time as the ruling monarch had in effect ended a decade before when his son George became the Prince Regent, died at the age of 82. Some who remembered the king when his reign began could recall the controversies that had afflicted his time on the throne: the loss of the American colonies; the conflict with his prime ministers; the discord within his family, but nonetheless, they reasoned that times had been better then, than they were now with the self-indulgent Prince Regent on the throne. Scandal accompanied the spendthrift Prince Regent who had been self-absorbed through the turmoil of the war with Napoleon and had turned his government into an enemy and his subjects into his adversaries. The British people were not consoled by the grand architecture and elegance that defined the Prince Regent’s lifestyle.
The death of George III simply meant that his son, now George IV, was king. For the years during which the Regency had been in effect, the mad monarch was a forgotten man and his death changed nothing. London aristocracy, which derided the first three Hanover kings for their clumsy, lumbering foreign ways and mocked the fourth one, did not feel that the Georges, taken collectively, were a credit to the nation and went about their business. George III did not inspire mourning and George IV did not inspire respect.
But while members of the haute monde evaluated the disappointing George on aesthetic grounds and found them wanting, other members of the English, less blue-blooded in ancestry, less plump of pockets, were seething. While the wellborn gentlemen concerned themselves with the cut of their trousers and the knots in their cravats, and the ladies sought the latest fashions, the ordinary men and women whose wages were insufficient for their needs resented the extravagant indulgences of Society. The unrest which had boiled over into revolution in France had not been imitated in England, and the victory over Napoleon should have fortified the English. But the war had been costly and that cost had fallen upon the workers of England. Their impotent rage went largely unnoticed because the Corinthians were gambling, drinking and womanising and what happened beyond the boundaries of Belgravia was insignificant.
ONE
Only pedagogues and bluestockings, those educated, intellectual women of the 18th-century Blue Stockings Society paid heed to the discontent that they detected seething beneath the hidden horizon of the social structure.
One of those bluestockings, albeit self-proclaimed, was Phoebe Stanford, age nineteen. Raised in an England where the king was crazy and his son was Regent, she spent more time in her uncle’s library than she did in society’s drawing rooms. But her uncle, Lord Glastonburg, was an indulgent guardian and did not object to having a niece who freely engaged in political discussions with his dinner guests.
Phoebe’s parents lived in India where her father was a military officer and her mother an energetic matron whose suppers and balls were among the most anticipated events of the social calendar. But Phoebe, who had more in common with her bookish uncle than with her socially ambitious mother, had pleaded with her parents to allow her to stay in England and they had done so with a sense of relief.
Truth be told Phoebe was not biddable, like the daughters of their friends. No, Phoebe Stanford was a challenge.
Her mother told her that she was going to ruin her eyes with so much book-reading, and her father, who found raising sons to be much easier, had nothing to say to her after exhausting the subject of any potential beaux.
As she had no suitor, her London Season as a debutante the year before having been an unsuccessful venture, there was nothing to answer. But being in England rather than India meant that she was not obligated to endure her father’s stale line of interrogation. Uncle was kind and good-humoured and like her, a lover of books.
He was rather forgetful and absent-minded, and had found it to his advantag
e to have Phoebe in the household because she did a much better job of managing it than he had. They got on very well together.
He was in the breakfast room, lingering over his tea and reading the newspaper, when she returned. He smiled in greeting, then, as he noticed the books she carried, his interest sharpened. “Anything of note?”
“Perhaps.”
“Hmmm. . . . The History of England, From the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of Henry VIII.”
“Yes, there are eight volumes. I only chose one, however, in case it’s completely dull. But this should be great fun and not dull at all.”
“Hmm. . . Ivanhoe. Yes, that looks promising, and historical in its own way. Very good, my dear. You must tell me what you think of them.”
Phoebe sat down at the table and poured herself a cup of tea. It was always entertaining to converse with Uncle Glaston because his thoughts seemed to spring out of his head without any way of predicting their source, like exotic plants that blossomed without roots.
“I passed several people on my way. They were talking about the king’s death.”
“Hmm? Oh, yes, of course, His Majesty. Strange to live so long and yet in the end, not to have lived at all. I sometimes wonder if the Americans haven’t got the right notion after all.”
“The right notion about what, Uncle?”
“The monarchy,” he answered, folding his newspaper, a sure sign that he was eager to be engaged in discourse. “After all, the Hanovers have hardly been stellar representatives of the monarchy, now have they?”
“I don’t know, Uncle. I only know what people say about the Prince Regent. They say he has exquisite taste in buildings and none at all in people.”
“A fair assessment, I daresay.” Her uncle removed his spectacles and frowned, his usual expression when he was evaluating his analysis of a subject. “I wonder if we’re meant to be ruled by a succession of genetic dullards.”
“What do you mean?” Phoebe replied with a frown.
“I suppose that book you’ve chosen will enlighten you as to the quality of past monarchs,” he said, gesturing toward the tome on the history of England. “When one considers the dynasties that have sat on the throne, I wonder if one can make a convincing argument for the monarchy. Or even whether we ought to put our trust in Parliament at all.”
“Who would govern us if not the king and Parliament?”
“I’ve no idea. But I am not enthusiastic about the situation as it now stands, and Prince George—King George, rather—is unlikely to be any better as king than he has been as Prince Regent.” He smiled. “Perhaps Guy Fawkes had the right idea. Barrels of gunpowder below the chambers where the House of Lords sits and ignite them.”
“Uncle! Surely you’re not saying we’d be better off with anarchy!” Phoebe smiled at him, amused by his fanciful notions.
“As Fawkes was foolish enough to have been discovered before his plot could unfurl, we shall never know, shall we? We could transport the gunpowder ourselves and see, taking care not to be noticed so that our political experiment could proceed.”
“You are quite the radical today,” Phoebe responded with a laugh.
“If you read the newspapers, you’d be radically inclined as well,” he said, handing it to her. “There’s a great deal of discontent bubbling up from the bottom.”
Bubbling up from the bottom was an intriguing description. “What do you mean,” Phoebe asked perplexed.
Unlike Papa and Mama, Uncle Glaston approved of a young woman knowing what was going on in the world around her and he encouraged her to read the daily newspapers. It was a secret between uncle and niece, one not shared with her parents who would have been shocked at the liberal boundaries of guardianship which Phoebe’s uncle allowed.
“The Prince Regent and his set live a very ostentatious sort of existence,” Lord Glastonburg explained. “He’s a fool, of course.”
“But with very good taste,” Phoebe interjected.
“I concede his taste; I dispute his sense. For people struggling to put food on the table, the magnificence of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton is an affront. Nothing at all is being done to balance the power of the traditional ruling class with the rising power of the industrial class. One cannot simply rattle one’s ancestral jewels in the direction of the class not born to fur and pearls and expect them to scurry back to their corners.” At the bewildered look on his nieces face, Lord Glastonburg took a deep breath and changed the subject.
“Speaking of fur and pearls . . . the Duchess of Tenley has invited us to a ball.”
Phoebe sighed and then pouted. “Must we?”
“I suppose so. Your mother will wonder how you are spending your time if I don’t provide evidence, every now and again, of some social event. You must go and I must take you. We shall endure our fates and absolve ourselves of mandatory attendance for the fortnight to follow.” Lord Glastonburg replied and winked at his niece. “It will give us the time we need to plot our overthrow of the government.”
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