“You think me incapable of looking after myself?” she snapped back haughtily, anger dissolving her self-pity.
He paused and glanced up at her with skepticism. “I’m sure your material comforts are well and truly catered for by an army of servants, Mme la duchesse. Although... I am surprised to find you here alone. Where are the gargoyles?”
Antonia, who was patting her face dry with a white handkerchief she was surprised to find crumpled in her hand, paused. She was mystified. “Gargoyles, M’sieur?”
He carefully extracted her white-stockinged foot from the tanned half boot of soft kid leather and set the boot aside.
“The dreary-faced twosome that follow you everywhere.”
“Oh!” Antonia smiled, wriggling her toes and feeling more herself. The dimple appeared. She was very pleased with his description. “Spencer and Willis they do look like gargoyles. Very fitting for my house, yes?”
“Very fitting,” he agreed, thumb gently rubbing the ball and instep of her small foot. “Why don’t you send them back to sit upon the chimney pots where they belong?”
“If only that were possible,” Antonia said with a sigh, suddenly more rested yet supremely unaware as to the reason why. “I do not want them. I do not need them but Julian he thinks he is doing them and me a great service. They have been with me since just before Mon—over three years now, so me I do not have the heart to dismiss them. And if I did, where would they go? They have no home to go to. Treat it is their home now.”
“Distant poor relations?”
Antonia nodded. “Sisters. Willis is unmarried and Spencer her husband was a great wastrel. He gambled away their small fortune and then shot himself. It is very sad for them. And so he Julian took them in and gave them to me. Parbleu! What am I to do with two sisters unknown to me? And what are they to do with me? I wonder sometimes at the workings of my son’s brain. For one who is married to a woman of acute intelligence, he Julian can be a great blockhead when it comes to his mother. Does he think because we three are women we will of course get on famously? As if being female is all that is required to have mutual interests! Willis knows only schoolgirl French and Spencer pretends not to understand some of the things I say so she does not have to repeat it to Willis. I think what I say shocks her. Do not ask me what in particular because me I do not remember! And just because I cannot create one stitch, so am a useless embroiderer, they think I am a sad loss to womankind! Nor do I care to hear about the good works of Mr. Wesley or the latest sermon by our Reverend Beak, which is all they bore on about over endless cups of tea, which is a beverage I abhor.” When Jonathon chuckled and shook his head she squared her shoulders and gave a little shudder. “You see the impossibility of the situation my son he has put me in?”
“I do! I do! But I have every confidence you found a satisfactory resolution.”
Antonia could not suppress the dimple.
“Naturellement,” she replied, and ignoring her internal voice that wondered why she was sharing family confidences with a complete stranger, added proudly, “We came to an arrangement that suits us very well and that he Julian does not need to know about. Spencer and Willis now live in the Bridge Gate House—”
“The gate house beside the bridge that crosses to this side of the lake?”
“Yes. Monseigneur had it built to complement Crecy Hall, so it is also a great piece of fanciful architecture, with turrets and buttresses like Strawberry Hill. It is a functioning house nonetheless and it suits the sisters very well. And so they live there very comfortably and me I live here and we do not bother each other in the least except—”
“—when you visit the big house, and then they accompany you and that is how they earn their bed and board, playing at being your shadow?”
“Exactement! They are very good shadows, I think. Sometimes too good and it puts me out of sorts and I want to be angry with them but I cannot because that would be churlish. Following me about at dinners and balls and the like is their only chance to repay Julian his great kindness for taking on the care of them. It gives them a chance to dress up in their best silks and feel important and to look down their noses with disapproval at the behavior of those more fortunate than themselves. Such occasions give them fuel for weeks of endless discourse! It would be too cruel to take away what little excitement they have in life.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t introduced them to the Lady Strathsay,” he replied flippantly, and when Antonia blinked added with a crooked smile, “Doesn’t the Countess own to the same puritanical principles as the Gargoyle Sisters? The three of them could wax lyrical for hours on the excesses, real or imagined, of their noble cousins. Their opinions would also, no doubt, greatly add to her ladyship’s self-consequence; not that it needs adding to, mind you. But Willis and Spencer certainly wouldn’t look out of place in her stiff-necked company.” When Antonia clapped her hands to her cheeks, as if in horror, he added quickly, “The Countess is your aunt, so if I have offended—”
“No! No! It is the perfect ploy, M’sieur! Perfect! I do not know why I did not think of it,” Antonia assured him. Her green eyes sparkled mischief. “Charlotte she will take to them too, if only because they belong to me. Perhaps she may even ask that they visit with her, and then I will be able to come and go from here as I please and without shadows! And Julian he will not be able to say no because Charlotte she will hound him to a boredom so great until he agrees to allow them to visit her in Buckinghamshire. She has become very proud and insufferable with age and few people will give her the time of day, and so I pity her a little.
“Her husband he is my uncle and lives openly with his mistress and their two children in the West Indies. It is a situation that enrages Charlotte beyond belief. But who can deny my uncle his happiness? By all accounts, his mistress satisfies him in every way. Not Charlotte. She is of that type who is incapable of physically loving anyone; her temperament it is very cold.” She pulled a face. “She shared—No! Shared it is not the right word—She endured her husband’s bed only enough times to give him an heir and a spare and then—” Antonia snapped her fingers. “No more.” She leaned forward, as if not wanting to be overheard, her face close to Jonathon’s, who was still on bended knee before the chaise, and added confidentially, green eyes wide in disbelief, “Can you imagine it, not enjoying to make love? It is incroyable, is it not? But I assure you, Charlotte she is such a one.”
Jonathon tried not to smile at her innocent delivery of such plainspoken revelations, thinking her the most entertaining creature he had ever encountered. No wonder the Gargoyle Sisters with their puritanical mindset swooned at her pronouncements. And when she leaned in so close that he could count the long black lashes framing her lovely eyes, she unwittingly presented him with the splendid vista of her magnificent breasts spilling forth from tight bodice and gaping gossamer fichu. He dared not take his gaze from her face.
“Why are you walking and not riding about the countryside?” he asked brusquely to mask a frisson of desire. He signaled for her booted left foot to be placed upon his knee, which she did without argument, his attention wholly focused on the knotted laces. “I thought only village girls and poor squires’ daughters walked. Sarah-Jane tells me that females of noble birth gallivant about the countryside on nothing less than a fine stead with a groom or two in tow.”
“But me I like to walk,” Antonia answered stubbornly. “I have walked about the countryside as you say ever since Monseigneur left—” Again, she could not bring herself to say it, though it was the closest she had come to mentioning her beloved husband’s death since Jonathon had entered the pavilion, adding swiftly, “It is not for anyone to care if I walk or ride!”
“I agree. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Polite Society since returning to England,” he said conversationally, ignoring her slip of the tongue and looking up as he unlaced her boot, “it’s that Society cares very much if one of their own, a duchess no less, doesn’t conform to their ways. I
suspect it’s not the done thing for you to be trudging up hill and down dale in your fetching half-boots.”
Antonia snapped her fingers. “That is what I care for Society’s dictates. Conform? Pshaw! Monseigneur he was above all that nonsense.”
Jonathon gave a bark of laughter. “Good for him!” thinking Monseigneur must’ve been one hell of an arrogant nobleman, and liking him for it. “And bravo to you. You should never stop being yourself, Mme la duchesse,” admiring Antonia’s spirit and thinking she possessed the most luminescent skin and sparkle to her eyes when she was animated.
“Just because I am a duchess does not mean I too do not have two fine legs to walk about like any village maiden, does it not, M’sieur? This I have told Julian a hundred times, but my son he does not listen.”
“Oh, I’m sure your legs would put to shame most village maidens,” he murmured, instantly dropping his head to remove the half-boot from her foot which still rested on his bended knee. “You must tell your personal maid not to lace your boots so tightly in future,” he lectured. “No doubt she’s done the same with your stays. If the indentations on the bridge of your foot are anything to go by I’m surprised you can breath at all.”
“And what makes you an expert on female corsetry, M’sieur?” Antonia asked haughtily as she sat back and unconsciously wriggled her toes before tucking her stockinged right foot up under her flowing petticoats. Her left foot remained in his warm hand. “No, do not answer me!” she added quickly when he grinned and looked away, adding with unguarded frankness, “I do not like wearing stiffened stays and Monseigneur agreed that I avoid wearing them when we were at home. Whalebone and buckram, they are too confining. At home I wear jumps, always.”
“Jumps? Jumps, Mme la duchesse? Never heard of such an article of female underclothing. Then again, female fashion from the west takes its time reaching the Indian subcontinent. Please to enlighten me.”
“I do not know if women here in England they wear jumps but in France they are very much the rage for déshabillé. Mine are made for me in Paris by an expert corsetiere. They are similar to stays to look at but the construction it is very different. There is no stiffening of any kind only layers upon layers of fine cotton padding and as such they are very comfortable. It is as if I am not wearing an undergarment at all. They open here, at the front. Look, I will show you,” she said matter-of-factly, as if discussing any mundane object and not one intimately connected with her person.
When he glanced up she had let the fichu fall from about her bare shoulders and had dropped her chin to examine her bosom.
“You see these ribbons tied up as bows, they are what close up the front,” she lectured, pointing out a row of neatly tied satin bows that ran the length of a soft silk embroidered bodice that covered her breasts. “And because the ribbons are here in the front and not in the back as are the lacings of stays, me I can easily undo them and remove this bodice. Observe,” she added in the same studied tone as she tugged on the end of the satin bow closest her décolletage, oblivious to the effect this demonstration would have on her male audience of one. The bow unraveled and the jumps gaped open displaying to superb advantage a deep cleavage barely contained within a thin white chemise with a pretty lace border. She glanced up with a smile of satisfaction. “So you see not always do I need Michelle to help me undress. Jumps are most convenient, yes?”
Jonathon nodded mutely. Convenient? Dear God, no wonder Monseigneur had preferred her in jumps. What man wouldn’t enjoy tugging at those bows? He’d lay down good money the Duke had been expert at getting her out of her jumps in record time. He was as giddy as a schoolboy and went dry in the mouth thinking about it, astonished that she was devoid of wiles and genuinely oblivious to her powers of attraction. It was no small surprise then that the present Duke had two gargoyles posted as her shadow!
Finally, he tore his gaze from the mesmerizing sight as Antonia retied the satin ribbons into a bow then gathered the fichu about her shoulders and across her breasts. Clearing his throat, he said in a voice he hoped wasn’t thinned by desire,
“And here was I thinking, incorrectly as it turns out, you would need to wear buckram or whalebone to keep everything in its proper place.”
“I beg your pardon, M’sieur? What is this proper place?”
“Well, er, don’t most well-endowed women employ whalebone to keep their breasts up?”
Antonia gaped at him, green eyes wide in disbelief that he had the temerity to make such a suggestion. “You think I need to wear whalebone to keep my breasts up?”
He smiled sheepishly but it was not lost on him that she was shocked more at the suggestion than at the question itself. So grief had not stripped her of vanity. Good.
“In my experience, Mme la duchesse, full breasts droop if—”
“Pour quoi? Droop? Droop? What is this-this droop?” Antonia was aghast. Angry pride spurred her to give an outrageously candid and thus indiscreet response. But she had always spoken her mind; it was second nature to her. “Monseigneur he says I have the most perfect breasts imaginable because they are firm and full, and suspend like ripened fruit still on the tree. That is not droop.”
Jonathon kept his lips shut tight and his head bent to the task of gently rubbing her aching instep. He could never imagine his Emily, or any other English female of gentle birth, being so frank and openly conceited, and definitely not about such an intimate subject as female breasts, their own or anyone else’s. The Dowager Duchess was so delectably frank. Yet it occurred to him that it might be a matter of interpretation, because she spoke exclusively in French; that perhaps she would not be so forthright if she spoke in English. Somehow he suspected that it had little to do with translation and everything to do with the person she was. He liked it. He liked it very much.
“Ripened fruit, Mme la duchesse,” he managed to say in a level voice as he again cleared his throat. “Monseigneur certainly has a good turn of phrase. I shall take his word for it.”
“Yes, you must. Now please you will let go of my foot because our afternoon tea it is here.”
Through one of the ornamental archways Antonia had spied her butler coming down the winding path that connected the pavilion to the dower house, carrying the heavy silver teapot, a small army of liveried footmen snaking behind with the rest of the tea things.
Our afternoon tea. Jonathon liked that too.
“Thank you,” she added in a small voice, which brought his gaze up from her stockinged foot to her face. He wondered why she hesitated to look him in the eye. “My feet they feel much better for your attention.”
“It was my pleasure, Mme la duchesse.”
He was about to rise when a young voice of indeterminate gender spoke at his back, asking anxiously in French,
“Mema? Mema! Your ankle it is not twisted? You’ve not hurt yourself, have you, Mema?”
And then another, deeper, and most definitely male, voice added with the same concern, “Shall I have the footman fetch your maid, Mme la duchesse?”
Jonathon rose up to all of his six feet and four inches and turned to look down on a thin strip of a boy with a head of tight black curls and inquisitive brown eyes that regarded him with a frown. He looked familiar. Standing at his shoulder was a stocky young man with a shock of red hair and whose eyes were the same color as those possessed by the Duchess and her son the Duke.
“I’m rather large in whatever occupation you care to place me, young man,” Jonathon replied placidly to the redhead. “But footman I am not.” Smiling, he stuck out his hand in greeting to the little boy. “Jonathon Strang Esq. And no, Mema hasn’t twisted her ankle.”
“It’s Frederick, M’sieur,” the little boy replied politely as he peered up at the tall man as they shook hands. “Frederick, Lord Alston, but everyone calls me Frederick. You can too. Are you Mema’s friend?”
“Yes, I—”
Before Jonathon could say anything further, Antonia flew off the chaise longue in her stockinged feet and su
nk to her knees to envelope her eldest grandson in her warm embrace before releasing him and kissing his flushed cheek. She spoke in rapid French.
“You are just in time for afternoon tea, mon petit chou. Come sit by me and tell me all about the preparations for your boat race. It is tomorrow, yes? Who is your oarsman? Are Louis and Gus to have their own boat this year like your Papa promised? What does your Mamma say to it?”
With her arm about the little boy’s shoulders she smiled warmly at the stocky young man with the shock of red hair and put out her hand to him to have her fingers kissed.
“Merci, Charles, for bringing Frederick to me,” she said gently.
To Jonathon’s surprise the young man blushed and looked bashful. He merely nodded before turning to Jonathon and making him a short bow.
“Apologies for the footman comment, sir. I should have been more observant and noticed your India waistcoat. It’s Charles,” he added. “Charles Fitzstuart. Lady Strathsay’s youngest son.”
“But we do not hold that against you,” Antonia quipped, as she led her grandson to the chaise. Once comfortably seated together, she proceeded to ask him all sorts of questions about the boat race while Jonathon and Charles Fitzstuart retreated to the archway, Jonathon to put away his tinderbox into a pocket of his discarded frockcoat and Charles to unbutton his riding frockcoat for it was a warm day and the ride over had entailed a long detour to avoid crossing the bridge, which would have alerted the ladies at the Gatehouse Lodge who in turn would have reported his son’s trespass to the Duke.
Both men kept out of the way of the butler and the servants, who went about setting up the afternoon tea things on the low table surrounded by cushions. Those delicate porcelain teacups and saucers, small decorative cake plates and silver cutlery no longer required were removed, the remaining four place settings positioned at one end of the squat table. Silverware, sugar bowl, creamer, and a fresh plate of cakes and a bowl of sweetmeats were then arranged amongst the bowls of flowers and fruits to the butler’s satisfaction. All but one of the footmen was then waved away, to return to the house. The butler took up his position behind the teapot on its silver stand, the footman ready to offer assistance when required, and waited for a signal from the Duchess to commence pouring out.
Autumn Duchess: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) Page 6