The Courtesan's Wager

by Claudia Dain

  “No, not at all,” Amelia said. “I’m not so particular in my requirements. Merely a duke, that is all I require.”

  “Merely a duke,” Sophia said, smiling. “If I may say so, your requirements in a husband have not gone unnoticed.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Amelia said, her voice barely above a mortified whisper.

  Sophia put down her cup and leaned back slightly in her chair, considering Amelia more closely than was quite polite.

  “Lady Amelia, you have hardly been discreet. Surely you were aware of that?” Sophia said.

  “I’m quite certain I don’t know—”

  “Then allow me to make it clear to you,” Sophia interrupted pleasantly. “You have been very singular in your interests and it has not gone unnoticed. Indeed, it has not gone unremarked upon, at least in certain circles.”

  Amelia put down her cup. It rattled against the wood, announcing her distress.

  “Naturally, the men you have targeted are the most aware of your interest, as indeed they should be as they are the targets of every mama of every woman of the proper age and rank in Town. Men in that particular situation, which only a man would be so foolish as to find onerous, are very attuned to plans such as yours. How else to remain unmarried for more than a sennight? The fox does become wary whenever dogs are in the vicinity, does it not? Perfectly natural, though what a dog plans to enact upon a fox breaks the metaphor entirely.”

  Sophia was speaking in the most casual, most conversational tone possible. Amelia was quite sure of this even as her stomach was heaving up toward her mouth. She was going to be sick. There was nowhere to be sick in this room, if one discounted that very expensive-looking green porcelain vase. She thought she should discount it, at least for as long as she could.

  “Lady Dalby,” Amelia said, “I cannot think you are correct. Surely, you overstate it?”

  “Darling, I never overstate anything. Are you feeling quite the thing? You look rather more pale than when you entered. Shall I ring for food?”

  The thought of food at the moment did very unpleasant things to her stomach. She pushed the idea away with that mental vigor Sophia so prized.

  “No. I’m fine,” Amelia said, well aware that her upper lip was covered in sweat.

  “I shall continue then, shall I?” Sophia said. “Of course, the thing to do, and you have begun it so well, is to continue on as you have done, only more so, naturally.”

  Amelia, of course, had her own plans in place for what this meeting with Sophia Dalby should have done, but this was rather more than she had intended. Quite a bit more, actually. She found that what she most wanted to do at present was to run from the room and demand that Hawksworth carry her home in his arms. Only he wouldn’t because he was as lazy as a cat.

  “I’m sorry,” Amelia said softly. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” In all truth, she was very much afraid that she understood all too well.

  Sophia blinked and then smiled in exquisite patience. “The thing to do, Lady Amelia, is to continue on. You have a preference for dukes. It is not unknown. Let us only make it more known. Let us, indeed, require these three delicious men to interview for the post of husband. A most satisfactory solution and so very to the point, do you not agree? Lady Amelia, are you quite certain that you’re feeling well?”

  Amelia thought that, for the first time in her life, she might actually be on the verge of a faint. She did hope so.

  Three

  “WITH Blakes married now, perhaps Mother will let you slip a while longer,” George Blakesley said in the least hopeful tone imaginable.

  “Optimist,” Iveston said from his slouch on the sofa in the second floor sitting room.

  “Worse,” Cranleigh said in a mumble of ill humor. “Liar.”

  It was the family sitting room, closed to all but those closest to the family, which meant a paltry fifty or so persons had ever seen it. In a house such as Hyde House, which took up a sizeable portion of Piccadilly Street and was therefore open to frequent large gatherings during the Season, the rooms in a house that were not under the public gaze were few indeed. The boys, that is to say, the sons of the fourth Duke of Hyde, spent considerable time in the family sitting room. In consequence, the room had a more than shabby appearance that their mother commented upon at every opportunity, yet she had relinquished the space to them fully, if not gracefully.

  The room, large enough to be comfortable for the five of them and yet small enough to encourage intimacy, had the benefit of a southern exposure and a fireplace that drew cleanly and evenly. In all, it was a comfortable place to complain about their lot in life, which meant that they were more often silently companionable than not. As the beloved sons of a very reasonable duke, they had very little to complain about. As the sons of a very pragmatic duchess, they knew it.

  But, naturally and completely in line with the reasonable workings of the world, they could and did complain about women and marriage. They were, or had been until earlier in the week, contented bachelors, however much that discontented their mother. But Blakes, the fourth son, had precipitously married Lady Louisa and that singular occurrence, which should have settled the duchess into a pleasant state of satisfaction and complacency about marriage in general and her sons in particular, had almost certainly resulted in the opposite.

  Molly, their Boston-bred mother, was more marriage-minded than ever.

  It was a most singularly unexpected and horrifying development.

  “You have to marry eventually,” Josiah said, “why not get it over with and be done with it?” Josiah, the youngest son and aged twenty-three, was too young to marry and rested safely within that truth.

  “Say the same when your manhood is on the matrimonial block,” Iveston said.

  The Marquis of Iveston, Hyde’s eldest son and heir apparent, was on the hook and they all knew it, Cranleigh more than anyone.

  “Amelia Caversham would do,” Josiah said from his languid lounge upon the sofa farthest from the fire, which was only right as he was the youngest of the litter, “wouldn’t she? She gives every appearance of being eager to marry a duke and as she is cousin to Louisa, well, it would make for cozy holidays in the country.”

  “Cozy for whom?” Cranleigh said abruptly, running his hands though his dark blond hair.

  “Why, for Louisa, I should think,” Josiah mused lazily.

  “If you don’t think Blakes will manage Louisa’s coziness, you know nothing of either women or men, Jos,” Cranleigh said a bit sharply, “which is hardly surprising, is it?”

  Jos, as he was called among his familial intimates, took immediate offense, which was only proper and certainly the appropriate response.

  “I am just back from Paris, Cranleigh!” Jos said.

  “And hauled back like a squealing pig, as I understand it,” Cranleigh rejoined, stretching his muscular legs out toward the fire. As the second born, he had a quite comfortable position by the fire. It was not a particularly chilly day, but one did not throw aside precedence merely on a technicality of that sort. “You weren’t there long enough to lift a single skirt, I’d wager.”

  “I was there a full week!”

  To which Cranleigh raised both brows fractionally and quirked his mouth almost invisibly. It was almost certain that Cranleigh’s responses in general would be invisible to all but family. He was a most contained sort of man, much like the duke, actually.

  “At least someone was made to squeal,” George said, winking at Cranleigh.

  “Get buggered,” Jos said, scowling.

  “Experience of that, have you?” George said, turning the knife.

  Jos jumped to his feet and said, “You face down that Indian and see what you find yourself doing!”

  “A valid point,” Iveston said, putting an end to it. “How did they find you? I never did hear the details.”

  “I have no idea,” Jos said, walking over to the window and staring sullenly out of it. “Having a good drunk, a giggling wench on m
y lap, and then we’re surrounded by savages, wench gone, bottle gone, Paris,” he sighed, “gone. I should never have gone with Dalby, it was because of him that they came.”

  “And you wouldn’t have gone without him,” Cranleigh said. “Hardly any fun in drinking and wenching alone.”

  Which would have sounded absurd to anyone outside of the room, certainly to anyone in London. They had discussed it once and reached the only possible conclusion they could: the duchess and her Boston upbringing had soiled them all. They could find fun only in small and carefully measured doses. It was most inconvenient as the ton did not practice frivolity in that particular fashion.

  “Did you actually know about them, before you found yourself face-to-face with them?” George asked.

  It was a likely question as none of them had heard even the slightest rumor that the Earl Dalby had blood relatives who were American Indians of the Iroquois variety.

  “Not even a whisper,” Jos said, which sounded almost as if he took it as a personal betrayal from his longtime friend, Dalby, which was a position of some merit as everyone in the ton knew everyone else’s ancestry back to the Tudors, if not before.

  “The duchess knew,” Blakes said, entering the room with the same self-congratulatory expression he’d been wearing since his marriage to Louisa, which was most excessively annoying.

  “Done rutting for the day?” Cranleigh murmured.

  “I certainly hope not,” Blakes replied pleasantly, which set the room to chuckling.

  “But whatever do you mean?” Jos said. “Mother can’t have known. She never said a word, in all these years.”

  “Not about that, no,” Blakes said, “but she knew and has known. I know it for a fact.”

  “She told you that?” George said.

  It was somewhat remarkable, what it did to five full-grown men to think that their mother had kept something from them with apparent ease for almost thirty years. It was quite inconceivable that a mother could possibly practice such discretion with, one might even say against, her own children.

  “No, not precisely,” Blakes said, “but Sophia said as much, without actually admitting a thing, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” Cranleigh said wryly.

  “That sounds precisely like her,” Iveston said. “What little I know of her,” he added. Iveston had, in fact, by way of his zealously guarded privacy, spent very little time with anyone, particularly women, and even more particularly if they were unmarried women.

  “I have some trouble believing that the duchess has more than a passing acquaintance with Lady Dalby. It would be approaching scandalous and we all know how little the duchess cares for scandal,” Cranleigh said.

  “Where we’re concerned, certainly,” Blakes said, “she has as much toleration for scandal as any mother, which is to say, none at all, but this is about another woman and, as we all know, women have very different requirements where other women are concerned.”

  “Mother is a woman, that is true,” George said somewhat reluctantly. It was most strange to think of one’s mother as anything other than a mother. Most strange and not entirely pleasant.

  They pondered that individually and silently, the room shifting as Blakes made a seat for himself next to Cranleigh on the sofa. There was hardly room, but Blakes didn’t seem to care that Cranleigh had to put his feet on the floor and shift his arse over to accommodate him. Blakes, now that he had Louisa, seemed to think he could do anything.

  “You still plan to leave?” Blakes asked him quietly.

  “I do,” Cranleigh mumbled, slouching down and extending his legs out.

  “More now than ever, I should think,” Blakes said.

  “There is no more now than ever to it,” Cranleigh snarled quietly, casting his brother a sideways glance. “I like the sea. I like Uncle Timothy, for all that he’s an American. There is little for me to do here.”

  “You could marry,” Blakes suggested.

  Cranleigh snorted. “I have no need to marry.”

  “I believe that people marry not only for need, but for want.”

  “I want for nothing.”

  “And no one?” Blakes asked softly.

  “And no one,” Cranleigh answered stiffly, his gaze on his feet stretched out before him.

  “Then I suppose it is wise of you not to marry,” Blakes said evenly. “When will you go?”

  “Next month, I should think. There should be an Elliot ship in port in the next few weeks. Timothy has offered me a place on any of his ships.”

  “Most kind of him.”

  “I’ve earned it,” Cranleigh said, shifting his weight.

  “No doubt of that,” Blakes said. “I suppose the duchess will cry.”

  Cranleigh snorted again, this time in amusement. “I suppose she will not. She didn’t cry the first time I took to sea. Why should she cry now?”

  “Perhaps because it’s the last time?” Blakes said softly, gazing at Cranleigh’s profile. “You don’t intend to return, do you?”

  “Of course I do. What nonsense, Blakes.”

  “Is it?”

  “Complete.” But he did not look his brother in the eye as he said it. No, Blakes was far too discerning and saw too many things Cranleigh did not wish him to see.

  “Well then, I’m glad to be wrong about it. I should miss you, I think.”

  “With that pretty bride waiting in your bed?” Cranleigh said with a half smile. “I think not.”

  “Oh, we do not restrict ourselves to beds, Cranleigh. Too pedestrian for my Louisa. She does like to get about, you know. Very ambitious, my girl. Quite like her cousin, Amelia, in that, though not in form, of course.”

  “Of course,” Cranleigh said. “Not at all in form. Quite obviously.”

  “They’re very close, those two, nearly like sisters. I should think Lady Amelia will make herself quite at home here, or whenever Louisa is in residence at Hyde House.”

  “When are you leaving, by the way?” Cranleigh asked casually.

  “As soon as the rains let up.”

  As it was April and had been raining for two days straight, Blakes might be in residence for another week or another month; it was impossible to predict. Cranleigh felt the urge to stand on a ship in the middle of the ocean rise up like a wave inside him.

  “And until then?”

  “Until then, we shall amuse ourselves as married folk do,” Blakes said. “What will you do to amuse yourself, Cranleigh? Or should I ask, upon whom?”

  “No, you should not ask,” Cranleigh said, shoving his brother off the sofa until his arse hit the floor.

  “I must ask, Lady Dalby, if this is some rare jest?” Amelia said softly past her rolling nausea.

  “About men? Never,” Sophia said. “Certainly, they are quite amusing, but this business of marriage must be approached soberly and with great care. I am more than confident that you agree with me, Lady Amelia, or why else would you have shown such wisdom in seeking my counsel and advice? Most wise of you, most prudent. I only find myself wishing that you had come to me sooner. Yet, things are still quite manageable, and by things I mean men.” At which point Sophia smiled slyly.

  Amelia allowed that being sly was precisely the reason why Sophia could manage to get her married.

  “I confess, Lady Dalby, that I don’t quite comprehend what you mean by an interview process,” Amelia said as calmly as could be expected.

  “I mean, Lady Amelia,” Sophia said, “that we shall advertise for a husband for you. Only dukes and heir apparents may apply, naturally. We shall make that very clear. It will come as a surprise to no one, which is precisely why we must boldly state both your intentions and your goals. It will have quite a good result, I should think. Men do so appreciate a forthright approach.”

  There was only one thing to be done in the circumstance. Amelia rose to her feet, her vision gone a bit gray about the edges. She slowly and very nearly gracefully slipped down to the floor in what appeared to be the most ineffectu
al faint any woman had ever endured.

  “But darling,” Sophia said, staring down at her, “you’ve fainted? Are you given to faints? Not a bad thing, in certain circumstances. We might make some use of it.”

  It was then that Amelia knew she had made the worst possible choice in coming to Sophia Dalby for aid. The woman was as cold-blooded as an eel.

  “Fredericks!” Sophia said, still staring down at her while she called for her butler. “Find Lord Hawksworth. I’m quite certain that he’s wandering about down the street or some such. The women of his family do like to keep him cooling his heels. I think Lady Amelia needs her brother now. And he wouldn’t want to miss this, would he?”

  It was then that Amelia knew that she had made the worst possible choice in coming to Dalby House.

  Amelia was sitting up when Hawksworth ambled into the room. One would think he might have hurried, but no. Sophia greeted him with a smile. He smiled in return. No one seemed particularly concerned that she was sitting on the floor. In fact, it might be said that no one even noticed, except for Fredericks, Sophia’s American butler. Fredericks winked at her.

  Oh, bother it all.

  “Not feeling quite the thing, Amy?” Hawks said, when he could pull his attention away from Sophia for the barest minute. “Perhaps you should be bled.”

  Hawks leaned down and helped her to her feet. She rose with considerable charm, considering. Once she was in her chair again, her hands fussing with her mussed hair, she said stiffly, “I’m quite all right.”

  “No bleeding then?” Hawks said. “Pity.”

  Amelia cast him a look that was as sharp as glass and said, “I’m fine, Hawksworth. I simply had a start, that’s all. A shock of sorts.”