She clung to his shoulders and accepted his mouth on her throat. “Lately I have been wanting a likeness done of me.”
“Have you?”
“Yes. Only of my chin, though.”
He kissed her chin. “This beautiful chin.”
“Also my earlobe.”
“Exquisite earlobe,” he murmured, trailing his tongue along the sensitive appendage.
“And perhaps my left ankle.”
“And these lips,” he said, kissing them anew. “These perfect lips.”
“Lips too,” she said upon a sigh because those lips were in heaven beneath his.
“I happen to know an artist who can do those likenesses.” His timbre was rich and husky and just as she loved it.
“I hoped so.”
“He is available now.”
“Splendid,” she said. “Let’s see to it immediately.”
“Absolutely. No time to waste.”
They went inside.
They did not reach the studio. Not directly, at least. Somehow they got caught in each other’s arms and the parlor was close by and their eagerness to confirm their new agreement went well beyond the need for a gentlemanly handshake.
Afterward, there was tea to be enjoyed, and then a great quantity of kissing in the kitchen too, since it proved difficult to cease touching even to drink a cup. In all of this they relearned each other, imprinting on their senses again the cadence of laughter, the texture of skin, the beauty of sighs, the glimmer of affection in blue eyes and brown, and the radiance of love.
Eventually they did reach the studio. She had installed a well-cushioned couch in the room, and explained it was because she liked to rest there in the afternoons, sometimes to read, and sometimes to mentally catalogue the branches of the trees in the garden and pretend she was not thinking of him.
They made love again on that couch. Kissing her he murmured the words atashe delam. When she asked him the meaning of that he said she was the fire of his heart, and then he showed her.
Later, when she was flushed and hot and damp and entirely satisfied, he went to the workroom, brought forth canvas and pencil, and began a new portrait.
The following days went much like that, including an efficient visit to a parson amidst the sittings and lovemaking.
When the portrait was completed, Ziyaeddin hung it on the wall in the master bedchamber. Libby said it was silly to have a big nude picture of herself in their bedchamber, what’s more a picture in which she was quite obviously in the throes of sexual gratification. He replied that it must remain, for whenever she happened to be away from home late at night at a patient’s bedside, it would provide him company and afford him enormous pleasure.
She teased him for it, and he caught her up in his arms and told her that he loved her, was mad for her, and that he commanded her to obey him in this because he was, after all, of royal blood. She said she would never agree to obey him in anything, but that she would make love to him at once, and then perhaps they could have some tea and biscuits and sit on the couch and read to each other, and then probably make love again, and wouldn’t that be much more fun anyway?
To that her prince responded as she desired.
Epilogue
May 1868
Scotland
The world was changing.
The postal clerk looked out onto the tracks of hard wood and black iron. The navvies were all gone away now, taking their brickmaking machines, their ramshackle huts, and their strange foreign tongues, leaving only the tracks behind. No engine or cars had passed through yet. The timetable said the first would arrive Tuesday, and with them the quickest mail delivery to ever arrive in the village.
Aye, change would come whether a man liked it or not.
Some things remained the same, though. The bells in Saint Margaret’s still announced the Sunday service. The little river that wended its way alongside the village still teemed with trout. The old mill’s wheel still turned with a creaking groan. And the doc and Mr. Kent still walked the riverbank path each evening after dinner—rain, snow, or sunshine—as they were doing now.
The clerk rocked back in his chair, watching the pair stroll alongside the sparkling water. Days past, there’d be three little ones running alongside, skimming stones on the water and tumbling in the moss. Those young ones, each of them brighter than the next, had long since grown up and moved on—one to the Royal College of Physicians in London, another to Paris to sculpt fancy statues, and the last to some far-off Eastern land. An ambassador, that one. Aye, this village had been too small to satisfy those three.
Only the doc and Mr. Kent remained.
The postmaster still remembered when the pair had first come. He’d been a boy, and till then he’d only ever seen Turks in the pages of books, with their turbans and ballooning pantaloons and great curving swords. If he hadn’t heard the alderman insisting on it, he wouldn’t have believed Mr. Kent was one of those. Dressed like an Englishman, and better spoken than even the reverend, he’d fascinated everybody in the village. Rumor had even gone about that he was some sort of royalty. A bigger taradiddle the clerk had never heard. What prince would live in a village in the middle of nowhere?
Whoever he was, folks had taken to him quick. The drawings he’d done for the village’s wee ones had won him the mothers’ favor. But when he painted the laird’s favorite hound so it looked like the bitch was leaping right out at a body, the whole parish had welcomed him.
Not her. Not at first. Lady Surgeon, they’d called her, and not kindly.
Eventually she’d won over everybody, of course. When wee Willie Pudding fell from the old ash and broke the bone clean through the skin, she’d known what to do—then, and any number of times after that.
She still kept up a busy practice in her office in the village, sometimes stepping out to assist with a troublesome birth in the tenant farms, at other times aiding the gentry in the sorts of woes only the wealthy and comfortable seemed to have: megrims and sleepless nights and gout. Mostly she helped those who couldn’t pay.
Together the pair had always lived quietly in their cottage at the end of the village. Everybody liked and respected them.
The postal clerk glanced again at the tracks and the sparkling new platform. It was a shame the doc didn’t travel as much as she once did. On the railway she’d arrive in Edinburgh or even London speedily—much quicker than in those fine carriages her patients sent for her. Once, he’d heard, Her Majesty herself had required the doc to call at Buckingham Palace.
Strangers still visited them at the cottage regularly, some grand, others modest folk, sometimes for weeks on end. The clerk himself occasionally saw to the shipping of Mr. Kent’s paintings. Only the wee pictures, though. The doc had once told him that Mr. Kent’s patrons preferred to retrieve the bigger paintings in person.
“Each is worth a veritable fortune in gold, of course,” she’d said to him as though she’d no care for a fortune or gold or any of it.
The postal clerk didn’t know a thing about art. But he knew the Kents paid their servants twice what every other household in the parish did. And according to the butcher and grocer they’d never been late paying bills. So the clerk supposed the doc hadn’t exaggerated about the worth of those pictures.
He watched them now as they strolled along the riverbank in the pinkish glow of the fading day. As always they walked hand in hand, slowly, her strides short, his bumpy, as though in the busy bustle of modern life they’d nowhere to be but side by side, enjoying the peace and quiet of a spring evening together.
Stepping onto the footbridge, she took his arm. They halted at its center, and turned their faces toward the sun setting over the water.
That sunset surely was one of the prettiest sights in Scotland.
Then the doc turned her face up to her husband and spoke, too far away to be heard, but her lips moved quickly—a mile a minute that woman could talk. Mr. Kent replied, and she smiled. Then he lifted his hand to her cheek and
bent his head.
The postal clerk looked away. It wasn’t right to stare, even if the couple did this every evening, exactly in that spot, rain, snow, or sunshine.
Some folks, he supposed, never forgot what it was to fall in love.
Of Marvelous Matters Historical, & Fulsome Thanks
All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us
created from the life God gave to Adam.
When time’s passage withers you to nothing,
I will grieve as if I’d lost a leg;
but you, who will not feel another’s pain,
you’ve lost the right to call yourself human.
—Saadi, Gulistan (13th century, Persia)
My Dear Readers,
Thank you for joining me on this adventure. I hope very much that you enjoyed Libby and Ziyaeddin’s love story.
When characters request that I write their story, I always say yes, whatever that entails, even if it seems incredible. For, happily, it turns out that actual history is more astonishing and historical people much more extraordinary than we often expect. And sometimes the stars align. On a single glorious day in Edinburgh I discovered Surgeons’ Hall, Sir Charles Bell, and Dr. James Barry. In Charles Bell, a brilliant surgeon and a painter of no little talent, I saw immediately how I could bring together my hopeful surgeon heroine and my portraitist hero. Filled with excitement from this, I was poking around in Surgeons’ Hall’s delightful little gift shop and found the biography of Dr. James Barry by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield. And The Prince was born.
Libby’s disguise is based on James Barry. Eager to become a physician, a young Irishwoman Margaret Buckley befriended a pair of liberal-thinking and influential patrons and in 1809, dressed as a man, began studying medicine in Edinburgh, soon becoming Dr. James Barry. Entering the army’s colonial service and spending decades in posts abroad, Barry lived the remainder of his life as a man.
I drew from Barry’s story not only the idea for Libby’s disguise, but many details, including a foreign patron embedded in British society who had plans to return to his home country and rule it; Barry’s self-imposed isolation until he became close friends with another intelligent student; the carefully crafted little pillows he used to fill out his trousers; his brilliance and successes; the anonymously posted placard accusing Dr. Barry of being “buggered” by his friend and patron; and the severe illness he suffered during which—in Barry’s case—his secret was discovered when his fellow medical men sought to care for him. On each of the few occasions when it appears that others did in fact discover Barry’s female sex, it was always hushed up, probably due to influential allies, but possibly also because of the respect many held for Barry’s abilities.
In the nineteenth century in Britain most men believed women lacked the physical and moral nature to be physicians or surgeons. In the scene in which Libby first tells Ziyaeddin she wishes to be a surgeon, I gave her the words of Elizabeth Davies, LL.D., in her 1861 piece “Female Physicians” in the Englishwoman’s Journal: women’s medical accomplishments to date were themselves evidence of women’s intellectual and physical power—and all accomplished despite being denied formal education.
My inspiration for Ziyaeddin initially came from a number of historical people. Mirza Abul Hassan, the Iranian ambassador in London in 1809–10 and 1819, wrote a memoir of his time among high society, and English people wrote about him as well, including newspapers. He was a very popular guest: handsome, charming, and beloved by fashionable hostesses, the prince regent, and many others.
Perhaps more importantly for Ziyaeddin’s rather less exalted lifestyle in Britain, I drew from the experiences of six Iranian students who sojourned in England between 1815 and 1818 to study literature, history, engineering, medicine, and weapons manufacturing. One of them, Mirza Salih (who again visited England in 1823 on a diplomatic mission), kept a journal of his travels and wrote many letters. As with the ambassador, others wrote about these young men, including friends they made in England and eager journalists. Nile Green’s wonderful history of these students suggested to me—among other details—Ziyaeddin’s appreciation for tea and dining as rituals of friendship.
Portrait painting was hugely popular in Persian culture at this time, and, although the style of portraiture Ziyaeddin adopted was European, it was easy to root his interest and aptitude in portraiture in his childhood. The English artistic prodigy Thomas Lawrence, his natural abilities and mentors as well as his style and desires, provided me particular inspiration too.
The early nineteenth century was a global era, with regular warfare between the armies of titans whose expanding mercantile empires were ever hungry. Inventing Tabir—and making its ruling family descended from Persian royalty—I placed it at the nexus of Russia, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire, and near the trade routes of Britain’s East India Company and the lands of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions. Here the mingling of peoples of many origins, languages, and faiths was not uncommon, and especially so in port cities.
For centuries Europeans referred to the ruler of the Ottoman Empire as “the Turk.” But by the early nineteenth century in Britain and America, “Turk” was often used indiscriminately to describe any Muslim. In Western news and entertainment Muslims were regularly depicted wildly inaccurately. The “caricatures” drawn in Lord Byron’s bestselling, Orientalizing poems and the diplomat James Morier’s popular novels, which Libby refers to, included gross misrepresentations of Muslims, Islam, and Eastern cultures intended to sell copies to a public thirsting for titillating entertainment. The opera offered further clichéd portraits. Literary correctives to these did exist, but they were never as popular.
To my knowledge, Charles Bell did not travel to Scotland in the fall of 1825. My timeline for this story was constrained by the actual Russo-Persian war of 1826–28, however, so I sent him briefly to Edinburgh to serve Libby’s purpose. Also, at this time in Britain there was an actual renowned physician named John Shaw. I discovered him, however, after my fictional character of the same name appeared in print in my novels The Rogue and The Duke. Libby’s father is not intended to be the real historical Dr. John Shaw.
The nineteenth century saw extraordinary advances in medical science in Britain, especially in surgery, with Edinburgh at the apex of these scientific developments. “Resurrectionists” made good money by robbing graves of their inhabitants and selling the cadavers to Britain’s expanding network of private anatomy and surgery schools. The grisly story of stealing corpses turning to creating corpses comes from Edinburgh too: in 1827 two unscrupulous yet enterprising grave robbers promised a surgeon more cadavers than they could find, and turned to murdering poor people who, they believed, would not be missed. One of their victims, however, was in fact missed, and the villains were convicted and hanged.
While researching I discovered lots of other fascinating stories too. For instance, young Charles Darwin studied medicine in Edinburgh at the same time as Libby. Bored and put off by his anatomy and surgery courses, he busied his brilliant mind learning the art of taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved man from British Guiana who was living and working in Edinburgh. It’s hard to imagine that this work with rebuilding the bodies of animals didn’t have a profound effect on Darwin’s later theories. And then there are tiny bits of magically delicious information I learned that do not appear directly in this novel, like the fact that the word caliber has Arabic roots—via Italian, then via French, and finally into English—and refers to excellent shoemaking.
Many people helped me with this book, for all of whom I send up copious cheers and offer oblations.
Thank you to my editor Lucia Macro, who is good and wise, and to Carolyn Coons and Eleanor Mikucki and all the patient, talented folks in Managing Editorial; Jeanne Reina, Patricia Barrow, Anna Kmet, and Adrian Jiminez for this beautiful cover; my publisher Liate Stehlik; and Caroline Perny, Pam Jaffee, Angela Craft, Kayleigh Webb, and everybody at
Avon who contributes to making my books so beautiful and helping readers find them.
Thank you to my superlatively wonderful agent Kimberly Whalen of The Whalen Agency.
For the generous people who read this manuscript and offered sage counsel, and for the amazing novelists, historians, medical experts, and artists without whose research, writing, and consultation I could not have written this book, I am profoundly grateful. These angels are Marcia Abercrombie, Sophie Barnes, Dan Bensimhon, Georgie C. Brophy, Georgann T. Brophy, Noah Redstone Brophy, Helen Dingwall, Hussein Fancy, Donna Finlay, Nile Green, Mona Hassan, Jean Hebrard, Paty Jager, Deborah Jenson, Arash Khazeni, Adriane Lentz-Smith, Mary Brophy Marcus, Vanessa Murray, Cat Sebastian, SrA Misty R. Sow, USAF, Ret., Martha P. Trachtenberg, Amanda Weaver, Barbara Claypole White, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the librarians at Perkins Library and the Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, and the writers and teachers at the Persian language and culture blog Chai and Conversation.
To the Lady Authors, Caroline Linden and Maya Rodale, whose laughter and encouragement I cherish, and to the beloved memory of Miranda Neville, whose own book research and wit lent Libby words that will forever make me smile: all my heart.
To my readers who make this adventure so much fun, and especially to The Princesses, I adore you and am grateful for you.
Thank you from the depths of my heart to my beloved husband, son, and Idaho, whose support and love sustain me and who inspire every one of my books.
For new readers who found me with this novel, welcome! Libby and Ziyaeddin’s romance is the fourth novel in my Devil’s Duke series. For more about the series, including bonus scenes and even more history, I hope you will visit my Web site at www.KatharineAshe.com. There you can also find my schedule of appearances and lots of other nifty extras too.
About the Author
KATHARINE ASHE is the USA Today bestselling, award-winning author of historical romances that reviewers call “intensely lush” and “sensationally intelligent,” including her acclaimed Devil’s Duke and Twist series and two finalists for the prestigious RITA® Award of the Romance Writers of America. She lives in the wonderfully warm Southeast with her beloved husband, son, dog, and a garden she likes to call romantic rather than unkempt. A professor of history, she writes romance because she thinks modern readers deserve grand adventures and breathtaking sensuality too. For more about her books, please visit www.KatharineAshe.com.
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