All coiffured heads looked to the Dowager Duchess, surprised she should choose to interrupt, and then turned toward the Countess waiting her response.
“I beg to differ, Mme la duchesse,” Lady Strathsay replied with extreme politeness. “Had you been seated where I was, you could not but reach the same conclusion. My one disappointment, that Charles abandoned his chance to come second to his brother.”
Antonia’s green eyes widened. She could barely contain her astonishment.
“You would have preferred that he Charles row on, and not go to the assistance of M’sieur le Duc to rescue his son who was drowning? Incroyable.”
The Countess shrugged, the few ladies who were capable of understanding rapid French now on the edge their collective seats. What the Countess said next had those ladies slack-jawed.
“What is the point of speculating on what might have been, Mme la duchesse, when that boorish merchant proved the hero of the hour, not Charles. So disappointing for a Mamma when her son goes to the rescue and arrives after it is all over and is relegated to valet. Holding that man’s shirt as if he was the commoner and not the great-grandson of the Merry Monarch! And then the brash fellow had the effrontery not to put this article of clothing on to cover his nakedness that was then on view to the world, as if he’s a prize stallion after a race in need of a good rub down! Outrageous and-and common.”
“My dear Lady Strathsay, I had no idea you were a connoisseur of the stud,” Henrietta Hibbert-Baker interrupted in English before Antonia could reply. She repeated in English some of what the Countess had said about Jonathon Strang to their female audience, adding with a flutter of her blonde lace fan, “I must point out there is nothing common about a prize stallion, particularly Strang, who doesn’t town-cry about his considerable assets. Even you must agree, my lady, he does show to advantage in wet breeches and no shirt.”
There were murmurings of agreement but the Countess remained suitably blank-faced. She had no idea what the silly woman was talking about and said so, but it was evident everyone else did because they were being childish and giggling behind their fluttering fans. She decided to ignore them all. Besides the creature had the temerity to interrupt in English, thus excluding the Dowager Duchess, which was unforgivably bad mannered. She made a point of explaining in painful detail to Henrietta Hibbert-Baker her social lapse, and in the most patronizing of tones, before turning to Antonia as if their conversation had never been interrupted.
“I despair of Charles attracting a female worthy of his lineage when he goes at the beck and call of others.” She sighed her annoyance. “Sometimes I wonder if he is even interested in females in that way. He certainly never shows it; unlike Dair who has three females dangling off his arm at any one time, and keeps a mistress in Chelsea whose already born him a brat if the gossip is to be believed. Not that I am at all pleased it is common knowledge, but I own to being relieved that he can breed. If only he would now settle down with an heiress worthy of his name and give me a proper grandchild.”
“That is very unfair on Charles, Charlotte, and you know it,” Antonia said in a low voice. “Possessing a caring disposition is nothing of which to be ashamed. And how do you know he has not attracted any female admirers? I am certain he is interested in females because he regularly corresponds with one in Paris. Perhaps she is the one. Charles has me address letters to our Hôtel and it is from there that the girl’s maid she collects Charles’ letters. And her replies, they come here to the dower house, and me I send them on to Charles.”
“Charles? My son Charles, write to a female in-in Paris?” The Countess was incredulous. She twisted up her mouth with distaste. “If he does, it’s not to anyone you or I would care to know. At least I hope it is not anyone who frequents the Hôtel because they would be highly unsuitable. At best, squalid little merchant princes seeking a rung on the social ladder. If Dair is to be believed, worse. The Hôtel is now inhabited by tenants. A Farmer-General has turned half the Hôtel into leased apartments and has had the effrontery to lease one to agents of the traitorous rebels fighting us in the American colonies. It is not to be born. But what can one expect from the French. The Duke and his sister must be turning in their graves.”
Antonia blinked and sat up very straight. She had no idea what Charlotte was talking about and wondered if the woman’s cup of tea had been laced with spirits in a calculated attempt to get her drunk and thus perform some social faux pas. Not that Charlotte needed alcohol to look a fool. She had just maligned the French to a French noblewoman and was oblivious to her rudeness.
“I beg your pardon, Charlotte, but to me you are not making sense. What apartments? What Farmer-General? Who are these traitors? What do the American colonies have to do with Charles and the Hôtel? What do you mean the Hôtel it is inhabited by tenants?”
The Countess now sat up very straight. She regarded Antonia with a mixture of incredulity and abject pity. She was also secretly and deliciously triumphant if for no other reason than it was about time the Dowager Duchess of Roxton had her gossamer blindfold removed and saw life as it truly was: disappointing and cruel. Antonia had led a charmed existence, shielded from life’s unpleasantness by a devoted husband, a sinister old roué who had kept his duchess cosseted as one does a beautiful fragile butterfly, and now her son, the present duke, was continuing on with his father’s preposterous coddling. It was this coddling that was to blame for Antonia being oblivious to her preeminent position as a Duchess. At the very least she should show a haughty contempt for those beneath her touch instead of curtseying to a dirty old farmhand for giving her a handful of daisies and allowing that sallow-skinned merchant to kiss her hand in full view of everyone. Such behavior did not sit well with Charlotte’s well-ordered view of the world for if there was no order, no hierarchy, where did that leave her, a Countess? Without hierarchy and order, if the nobility was not given the respect it was due, Charlotte Strathsay was little more than an aging woman abandoned by her husband, of little beauty or charm and with no particular talent for witty conversation.
“Oh, come now, Mme la duchesse!” Charlotte scoffed. “Do not pretend you do not know!”
“I do not. Why would I ask if I knew, Charlotte? You are being obtuse for its own sake.”
The Countess gave Antonia’s hand a perfunctory pat.
“I always maintained the old Duke kept you too sheltered for your own good,” she said with a sigh and a glance about for nodding approval from the occupants of the wingchairs and chaise lounges, and was met with only frozen expressions. She was pleased nonetheless that she was the focus of attention. “And now poor Roxton is burdened with carrying on his father’s ill-judged legacy. Your son—”
“I did not ask for your opinion of me,” Antonia said very quietly. “Your opinions are unimportant and never again will you speak to me of Monseigneur or of my son. I asked that you tell me about the Hôtel. That is what I want to know.”
“Know? I only know what everyone else knows, Mme la duchesse.”
Antonia scanned the arrangement of sofas to discover faces quickly averted and gazes cast to the Aubusson rug. At that moment, the double doors at the far end of the Gallery opened to admit some of the gentlemen, who had been sitting over the port in the dining room, much to the relief of the ladies who were discomforted by the Countess’s very deliberate baiting of the Dowager Duchess of Roxton. Antonia saw Charles Fitzstuart and Tommy Cavendish but her son was not amongst the group; she did spy her daughter-in-law. The Duchess had excused herself after dinner and gone up to the nursery to check on Lord Augustus and to wish her children goodnight. Deborah was now standing at the far end of the Gallery in conversation with someone out of view in the anteroom and Antonia wondered if it was the family physician and hoped Gus was as well as first diagnosed. She closed the sticks of her fan with a snap, determined to quit the tea trolley and her venomous aunt, but curiosity got the better of her and she asked the question.
“So what is it you know I do not
that makes you bursting at the laces to tell me, Charlotte?”
The Countess dared to smile triumphantly. She couldn’t help herself. She was dizzy with anticipation as to Antonia’s response to her news.
“Roxton sold your Parisian Hôtel nine months ago.”
Charlotte was hoping for theatrics and was bitterly disappointed.
Antonia stood and shook out her silk embroidered petticoats with deliberate slowness. The only sound, the tinkle of her gold and diamond bracelets touching as they slid up and down her wrists. The only sign she was rattled, when she fumbled with her fan but managed to catch it by its gold tassel before it fell with a clatter to the floorboards. A number of ladies, who were holding their collective breath as they furtively watched the Duchess, let out a sigh when the gentlemen came up to the tea trolley oblivious to the air of tension and requested tea and sweetmeats, Tommy Cavendish lifting the mood with the announcement,
“Well my delectable petit fours, it’s Tommy’s guess you’ve all been discussing the Jonathon prime rib while your rashes of bacon husbands have been out of cauliflower earshot. Am I right? Kitty?”
But Kitty, like the rest of the ladies, had risen off their chairs the moment the Dowager Duchess of Roxton had done so and stood waiting to see what she meant to do. When Antonia turned to go, a nod to her ladies-in-waiting to fall in behind her, the group sank into respectful curtsies then resumed their seats and watched her walk off up the Gallery at what Antonia hoped was the pace of a leisurely stroll.
So everyone knew, thought Antonia. Or thought they knew. She refused to believe Charlotte. She refused to believe common knowledge: that the Roxton Hôtel on the Rue Saint-Honoré, which had been in the family for over a hundred and fifty years, had been sold off by her son to a Parisian merchant. She refused to believe her son could sell his family heritage because selling the Hôtel was akin to selling off a piece of his parents’ hearts. The Hôtel was flesh and blood to her. It was part of her. She could no more think of giving up the house in Paris as stop breathing. It was the birthplace of Monseigneur, of his sister Estée, and of Estée and Vallentine’s son Evelyn, her own son Julian had also been born there. It was the first place she had called home, the house Monseigneur had brought her to when he had rescued her from Versailles. It was where she and Monseigneur had first made love. There had to be some other explanation. Some other reason Charlotte and the others thought the Hôtel had been sold. She would ask her son and he would tell her it was a ruse. That was all there was to it.
Antonia was determined to seek out the Duke to have his reassurance and then her heart it would quiet and she could return to Crecy Hall. Deborah would know his whereabouts. Perhaps he had gone up to see his children before joining his guests? And then, just as she was half way along the Gallery, Deborah turned and disappeared further into the anteroom and out into the Gallery stepped a stout gentleman whose flowered waistcoat and silk breeches proclaimed the gentleman but whose sausage-like fingers and swollen jowls exposed the glutton.
It was Sir Titus Foley, physician, healer-extraordinaire and confidant to the titled, fawned over and feted by Polite Society as some sort of miracle worker amongst his fraternity; a preeminent physician with a gift for healing fragile minds, particularly the fragile minds of the recalcitrant pretty young wives of noblemen.
Antonia loathed him. She also had much to fear from him.
What Sir Titus Foley had inflicted upon her in the name of scientific medical treatment was the stuff of nightmare and Antonia had not told a living soul. The humiliation was just too great. She was still uncertain what was real and what she imagined had happened in those weeks under the dandified physician’s care. She had been sedated with laudanum, sometimes so heavily she was left fuzzy-headed and disorientated with no idea if hours or minutes had passed her by. Which was probably just as well.
It was a year since Sir Titus had treated her for melancholia and yet the mere sight of the man made her shiver with anticipation and dread. She hoped she never recalled in detail the treatments meted out to her in the name of being cured. And here was the physician returned, smiling his fish-lipped smile, with his ferret eyes bright and bowing obsequiously before her as if he was a long-lost family friend.
She did not know what was more laughingly pathetic—that this buffoon of medical quackery had deluded himself into believing he was a learned healer when his perverted methods were a distillation of everything that was loathsome and vile about the medical profession, or that her son had deceived himself into thinking he was doing what was right and proper in trying to have her cured of morbid grief, as if grief could be healed by the bizarre attentions of a lecher-physician and his hocus-pockery.
Coming face to face with her tormentor gave her a frightening jolt. It also saddened her that her son had made good on his threat to send for Sir Titus. Her only hope now was that being out of her black the Duke would decide the presence of the physician was unnecessary. But here he was, bowing and scraping before her and as much as she wanted to snub him it was not in her nature to be cruel or bad-mannered so she kept her features perfectly composed and inclined her head in recognition of his presence and walked on. She would not extend her hand or engage him in conversation. She recoiled from his closeness; the thought of his bloated hands upon her, however briefly, made her nauseous. She stepped aside and continued on up the Gallery in search of her daughter-in-law, leaving Sir Titus with his buttocks in the air and his nose to the ground.
The physician had left the comfort of the dining room, where port and congenial company were plentiful, and then spoken at length with the good Duchess who had apologized that her noble husband was not at liberty to speak with him until he had concluded his meeting in the library, confident he had a place in this world of title and privilege, and was now left standing alone in a long hall blazing with candlelight, the object of ridicule by nose-in-the-air ancestors up on the walls and by the titled and privileged gathered around the tea trolley.
All because she did not treat him with the respect he deserved as a learned medical man, unlike those gentlemen who were begging his opinions over the port. He had just concluded a most lucrative contract to provide his superior medical expertise in the treatment of melancholia to Lord Barrow, whose second and much younger wife, a pretty brunette with liquid blue eyes, recoiled from her husband’s unusual proclivities in the bedchamber and thus refused to share the marital bed. Lord Barrow believed his wife to be suffering from some sort of nervous disorder and as he wasn’t getting any younger and needed an heir—his cousin Henry wasn’t getting his hands on the baronetcy or the castle—he appealed to Sir Titus’s expertise in such delicate matters to divest his wife of her reluctance.
Sir Titus had confidently boasted to his lordship that under his care he would have the wife cured of her disobedience and back in the marital bed and eager for his attentions within the month. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn from his lordship that Lady Barrow was with child soon thereafter. He had left Lord Barrow beaming, for this: snubbed and abandoned under the blazing light of a chandelier by the Dowager Duchess of Roxton. He ground his teeth, seething, to be summarily dismissed by the illustrious and definitely the most divinely beautiful woman he had ever had the pleasure to call patient.
Upon receiving the Duke’s request he had literally dropped everything and made the arduous twelve-hour journey from his private sanatorium in Northumberland all for the opportunity to have the Duchess under his care again.
Under his care... He couldn’t wait. The thought of spending time alone with her... He in control, she to do as she was bid or suffer the consequences... It was the only way... Total submission. It had worked with great success for so many of his delicately bred female patients suffering from nervous disorders. But he had yet to break the Dowager Duchess to his will. This visit he was determined she would submit with his patented Chair of Correction: Strapped ankle and wrist the patient had no option but to surrender to treatment. And he had add
ed a new weapon to his medical armory: Blair’s water therapy. To see her in a wet chemise... He felt himself stir and quickly suppressed his desire to scurry after her.
“What a most astonishing and very welcome surprise to discover you out of your widow’s garb, your Grace! I hardly recognized you in such pretty petticoats, and in a color that compliments your eyes to perfection!”
Antonia made no comment, her ladies-in-waiting following at her back, the physician scrambling to keep up and forced to make a wide arc so that he was at Antonia’s side and not following behind.
“This change of raiment is very welcoming, your Grace,” Sir Titus continued, one wary eye to his surroundings, careful not to collide with the ribbon back chairs at intervals up against the wall between the undraped French windows. “I am surprised His Grace of Roxton did not mention such momentous news in our most recent exchange of correspondence.”
“M’sieur le Duc has better use of his time than report on his maman’s wardrobe! But as you see, I am out of my black, so your presence it is unnecessary.”
Sir Titus went giddy at the Duchess’s heavily accented English. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat of a lustful rasp to say with a light laugh,
“Oh, your Grace, you are so diverting I could almost believe you returned to full health! But I would be failing in my duty to the Duke and most importantly to you, if I did not exert myself to the fullest degree and thoroughly examine your Grace so that I can present my diagnosis to the Duke, and thus settle his Grace’s mind as well as my own that you are back to full glorious health in mind and body.”
Antonia stopped and turned on the physician and so abruptly that Willis and Spencer almost collided with her and had to stagger back, a hand out to each other to keep upright. She stared the physician up and down and then fixed on his bloated and florid face, a light in her green eyes that thrilled and alarmed him in equal measure.
Autumn Duchess: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) Page 17