My Seductive Innocent

by Julie Johnstone

  Aversley pulled the bell cord to summon the butler, but when he didn’t appear after a bit, Aversley pulled it again. After a while, it became apparent that the servant was not going to come. Aversley snorted. “The first thing you need to do is hire a new butler. The man is deaf. I can’t imagine why Scarsdale kept him on.”

  “I can,” Sophia said, and Amelia nodded her understanding.

  “Scarsdale liked to pretend he cared for no one, but he cared for his servants’ welfares,” Amelia said.

  Sophia gasped. “Maybe he thought of them as family!”

  “They probably treated him better,” Aversley added as Sophia swiveled on her heel and dashed out of the gallery.

  She had an idea.

  She found the butler in the dining room with a table of silver spread out before him. He didn’t turn when she walked into the room, probably because he hadn’t heard her. She stood and watched him for a moment, struck by the urge to giggle at his judicious counting of the silver, as if any might have disappeared. She moved to stand beside him, and when he didn’t look up, she cleared her throat. He dropped the fork he’d been holding and gawked at her.

  “I beg your pardon, Your Grace. I did not hear you. Do you need me?” asked Mr. Lewis.

  “Yes. I’d like to ask you a question about the portrait gallery.”

  He nodded.

  “Did my husband personally oversee the placement of those portraits when the house was redecorated or did he have someone else do it?”

  “He did it. He was very particular. The portraits had to be hung just as his mother had ordered them the year she died. I thought he might be changing the order, since he had me give him the keys to the attic and he spent days up there looking at the other portraits, but he ended up hanging the same pictures in the exact same places.”

  Sophia’s heart pounded so hard she felt breathless. “Are the other portraits still in the attic?”

  “Of course, Your Grace. I vow I’ve not touched a thing.”

  “No, of course not,” she hurriedly supplied to assuage his concern. “May I have the keys?”

  “To be sure, you may have anything you want, but I’m not the keeper of the keys. My wife is responsible for that.”

  “Your wife? You’re married?”

  He smiled. “It surprised me that she’d have me, too. Took me nearly forty years to get over the shock of it. She’s the cook. Shall I get the keys from her?”

  “Yes, please. I’ll come with you to meet her.”

  After meeting his wife, who was in the middle of preparing for lunch, Sophia made her way to the attic with Mr. Lewis, while Amelia and Aversley went to look around the gardens at her suggestion. She felt that if there were any secrets about Nathan’s past to be revealed, he would not have wanted them revealed to others. It didn’t take long to locate the large portraits. They stood against a far wall with enormous, white sheets hung over them.

  After assuring Mr. Lewis that she was not too fragile to help him remove the sheets, she started tugging them off one by one. In total, there were five long rows of portraits with ten paintings stacked in each row. She started at the first row.

  Nathan could not have been more than five in the first piece she uncovered. He had the characteristic chubby legs, cheeks, and arms that he had in the portrait downstairs. And―she narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow—he seemed to be wearing the same brown trousers, cream jacket with gold buttons, and gray-and-cream hat, tilted the exact same way. Maybe this portrait had a mistake, so the painter had done another.

  She stared at it, but when she could find nothing amiss, she simply moved on to the next one. Her breath caught at the sight of Nathan in the exact same clothes. He appeared as if it was, in fact, the very same day. She studied the green trees behind him and counted them. Then she took note of the placement of his hands and the number of creases in his trousers. She then flipped back to the second and third portraits and compared them. They were identical.

  She pressed her lips into a hard line. Something wasn’t right. She flipped through all ten portraits of Nathan and they were identical in every way except one. From the first to the last painting of Nathan, the expression on his face went from cheerful to miserable. In the final portrait, the painter had made it obvious that Nathan had been crying.

  She let the portraits fall back into place, dust swirling like tiny specks in the air, and swiveled toward Mr. Lewis, who had been standing quietly behind her as she had looked at the first row. “What are those portraits about?” she demanded, her voice high and her pulse increasing.

  He sighed. “Her Grace took it in her head that the young master was purposely making his face look odd, so she made the painter redo the portrait.”

  “But there are ten portraits here!”

  “Yes, Your Grace.” The butler’s voice had taken on a hard edge of disapproval. “The young master was made to put on the same clothes every day and stand in the same place and position for two months. It was the entire length of their visit. Poor lad. My wife wept for him. Secretly, of course, so as not to anger Her Grace.”

  A bitter tasted filled Sophia’s mouth, and her stomach twisted violently. “He stood all summer? But why did no one stop her?”

  “The only one who could stop her was His Grace, and he did, when he finally learned what she was doing.”

  Agitated, she waved her hand at the row of portraits she had just gone through. “Why did it take him all summer?” Her question came out as a high-pitched shrill.

  “He was rarely around. One could say, if one was inclined to gossip, he avoided her and, therefore, ignored his son, as a result. And it took much longer than the summer for him to figure out what went on here every summer for five years.”

  “Five years?” The very thought made her ill.

  He nodded and then motioned to the rows of portraits she had not had a chance to look at yet. “The row you just went through was the first year. The young master was five then. In the next row, he was six. With each row, his age increases a year until his father found out what was going on during a rare occasion they were all together at Whitecliffe. The young master didn’t want to leave Whitecliffe to come back here with his mother, and we heard, through gossip, mind you, that he pitched the most gruesome outbursts in front of some twenty-odd dinner guests when he learned they were to come back here, which culminated with the young master running away from Whitecliffe in the dark.”

  Mr. Lewis shook his head. “When his father found him, he discovered what had caused the outburst. His Grace, in an unusual show of defiance against his wife’s control, came here in a rage, toting Her Grace and his son along. He ordered every painting removed. She’d put every one of them up in the portrait gallery; there were so many you could hardly see the walls. He threatened to ship her to America and never allow her to return should she ever make their son pose for another portrait again.”

  Sophia trembled with rage. Nathan’s mother had been as bad as Frank, but in her own nasty way. She glanced back at the remaining portraits. She almost feared looking through the rest and seeing the pain etched on Nathan’s face. No wonder he’d had no use for love. He’d equated love with pain. “I’d like to look at the rest alone, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course, Your Grace.”

  After Mr. Lewis left the attic, she moved to the second row of portraits, then the third, the fourth, and finally the last. They were, as Mr. Lewis had said, placed in order of years. With each new row, Nathan had gotten one year older, his eyes a bit duller, and his expression vastly more cynical. By the last row, she bit her lip on a sob at the angry, contemptuous set of his face.

  Oh, Nathan! She ran her hand over his young face and wept for him.

  She slid to her bottom and cried for what seemed an eternity for the years, the love, the children, and the laughter they would never have. He had given her such joy, and he had risked his heart and his pride, she was sure, to take a chance on loving her. She dried her eyes and stood.
She was going to do everything in her power to be worthy of the gifts he had given her. She would love only him forever and honor him by becoming an Incomparable.

  The captain’s whip hissed through the air and sliced into Nathan’s back, still raw from the beatings he’d received every day since being held on board the Barbary ship as a slave. They were somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, now.

  Warm blood oozed down his back, and every time the whip struck anew to cut deeper into his mangled flesh, he flinched but did not cry out. He’d quit trying to get out of the ropes that bound his wrists to the whipping pole after the first week. It was futile, and he’d learned quickly that the captain only whipped harder, and would turn Nathan around and whip his chest, for what he considered cowardly behavior.

  All the new slaves were beat morning, noon, and night like clockwork. Nathan glanced up at the darkening sky. He couldn’t say how long the whipping lasted because he’d slipped in and out of consciousness, but he came fully to himself when they shoved him back in his regular rowing spot and chained him there.

  Pain snaked through every inch of his body, but he grabbed hold of his oars and rowed in time with the rest of the crew. To not row meant death and he had to survive for Sophia. Sophia. He cast his mind to her with a yearning that made all the cravings he’d ever had for laudanum or opium pale in comparison. She was his drug of choice.

  He saw her in the tavern in Moses’s arms with her eyes blazing in defiance. He saw her kicking and screaming in Mr. Exington’s arms, determined to rescue her brother. He saw her naked before him, professing her love for him. And then slowly, like a man savoring his dying breath, he recalled every second he’d ever touched her, tasted her, heard her, and every feeling that had been elicited. His fingers tingled with the memory of her silky skin. His ears rang with her laughter. His mouth watered to taste the sweetness only she possessed.

  The hours passed as he relived each moment in his mind, and near dawn, when his arms rebelled against rowing any more, he invented new places he would bed her. Under the stars would be his first choice. He longed to see her eyes twinkling in the moonlight. In lush green grass would be another place, with the sun beaming down on her creamy, pert breasts. In his memory he could smell her hair. And as the sun rose in the sky, he thanked Sophia in his head for, once again, helping him live to see another day.

  After that fateful day in the attic, Sophia stayed true to her vow with a zealous determination. With the help of Amelia, she hired a staff of twelve, including Mr. Burk, who had written to her wondering if she might be looking for a stable master. It seemed he could not tolerate Lady Anthony, which Sophia understood all too well. Once the staff was in place and she was settled into her home, she cloistered herself from everyone in the outside world except Amelia, who visited three days a week to give Sophia lessons on how to become an Incomparable.

  As the winter months drifted into spring, Sophia pored over Debrett’s and spent hours learning the correct forms of address for anyone and everyone she might encounter. She learned how to sit, walk, talk, dance, and sing. She studied French and history, and took lessons on playing the pianoforte. She rode Aphrodite every day and became an expert jumper and foxhunter, with Mr. Burk’s aid.

  In her free time, she would go to Nathan’s library and write letters to Harry or read one of the books that she thought Nathan might have read, snuggling under a blanket that smelled of pine, as he had. By the time spring had turned to summer, she had read “The Wanderer,” Principles of Political Economy, every single poem by Wordsworth and Shelley, and so many other books she lost count. Sometimes she would call Mr. Burk into the study at night and they would sit while she read poetry to him. In turn, he would tell her stories about Nathan.

  It was on the third or fourth story about Nathan rescuing an injured animal that tears suddenly filled her eyes with a realization.

  “Wha’ is it, lassie?” Mr. Burk asked, stopping his tale.

  She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I think Nathan saved animals because deep down he wished someone would have saved him.”

  Mr. Burk nodded. “Ta be sure. Especially that mangy, three-legged dog he loved so much—Duke.”

  Sophia’s brow furrowed. “I never saw a three-legged dog at Whitecliffe.”

  “Ye would’na have. He kept the dog with him always. When ye were in residence at Whitecliffe, the dog was in London because, if ye remember, His Grace’s trip to Newmarket was supposed ta be brief.”

  “Where is Duke now?”

  “I dinnot know, Your Grace.”

  It took Sophia several weeks to locate Duke and have him fetched to live with her, and then it took several more weeks to get Duke to quit growling at her, but by the time August rolled around, Duke was her best friend, constant companion, and guard. Everywhere she went, so did Duke. And for a three-legged dog, he got around rather impressively. The only thing the large black-and-white, long-haired dog ever did that she didn’t care for was to bring “gifts” to the house. She liked gifts just fine, as long as they were alive, but Duke especially loved to bring her dead gifts. She eventually got used to it and overlooked this one flaw. In her heart, she understood that Nathan had viewed himself like that dog, the one no one had wanted, and so for her, Duke could do no wrong.

  On a snowy day in January that marked the end of her mourning period―which she was only aware of because Amelia had been reminding her that she had to keep her promise to formally enter Society―Amelia surprised Sophia by appearing at her home earlier than was socially acceptable. And the duchess was not alone. Trailing behind her was Madame Lexington, who Amelia had asked to come. And trailing behind Madame Lexington were two girls, both of whom appeared to be twenty-one, the same age as Sophia now.

  She’d quite forgotten she had turned twenty-one until Amelia had asked her several visits ago when her birthday was. Only then had she realized the day had come and gone.

  “What’s all this?” Sophia asked as Amelia, Madame Lexington, and her assistants entered Sophia’s bedchambers.

  Madame Lexington paused and appraised Sophia. Her lips parted and her eyes grew wide. “Mon Dieu! Nature has given you a great gift to make up for your great sorrow.”

  Sophia was on the verge of asking Madame Lexington what she meant, but Amelia grasped Sophia by the arm and hugged her. “This is your birthday present! I’ve planned a dinner for your birthday tonight, and it will also be a test to see if you are ready for the house party.”

  Sophia furrowed her brow. “What house party?”

  “Oh my,” Amelia replied. “Did I forget to mention I have planned a house party in your honor?”

  Amelia’s face was such a comical display of her trying to look innocent and failing that Sophia giggled. “You did forget to tell me that most important fact. When is this house party?”

  “At the end of this week, so the dinner was of the utmost importance to allow us to see if there is anything else on which we need to work. I’ll expect you to stay at our house for the duration of the party, too. It’s a week long.”

  “But I only live down the road from you.”

  Amelia narrowed her eyes and plopped her hands on her hips. Sophia laughed and threw up her hands. One thing she’d learned this year was that Amelia had a stubborn streak in her as long at the Thames. And Sophia had promised she’d enter Society once her mourning period ended. Plus, she was getting a bit restless, and though she was nervous, she would like to make new friends and see new places.

  Madame Lexington cleared her throat. “Your Grace―”

  Sophia and Amelia both answered yes at the same time and then promptly burst into a fit of laughter. Sophia was the first to gain control. “Madam Lexington, call me Sophia.”

  The woman gave a definite shake of her head. “No. I could not. It’s not proper.”

  Sophia bit her lip. If Madame Lexington knew where Sophia had come from, she’d be happy to call her plain old Sophia.

  “Call her Duchess, then,” Am
elia inserted.

  Madame Lexington looked as if she was about to object but then simply nodded before giving two sharp claps and saying, “Show her the gowns.”

  There was a moment of flurry, and then both of Madame Lexington’s helpers scurried forward to present gowns to her. Sophia’s jaw dropped at the sight of a crimson gown that was cut so low she would be in danger of spilling out if she wore it. And she now had plenty to spill out. In her year in mourning, two things had grown: her hair, which hung midway down her back, and her breasts, which had gone from entirely too small to shockingly voluptuous. With an apologetic smile to Amelia and Madame Lexington she pointed at the crimson silk and shook her head. “I would never be so bold as to wear a gown like that.”

  Madame Lexington eyed her askance. “You should be so bold,” the woman said blandly. “You have a figure that puts the very best I’ve ever dressed to shame, and my dear, I have clothed many Incomparable ladies.”

  She gaped at the seamstress. She knew her figure had filled out, but when she studied herself in the looking glass, she saw the same old mousy-appearing lady. Just now with breasts and hips. “That is kind, but certainly too kind.”

  “Non,” Madam Lexington replied, slipping momentarily into French. “French women are never too kind. Too nasty, yes. Too kind, never! And I tell you honestly that you will beguile in the blue gown, but in the red one the eligible bachelors will chase you like bloodthirsty hounds after a fox.”

  “Then the blue gown, with a fichu placed at the chest, will be perfect for me, as I do not want any eligible bachelors chasing me.”

  Madame Lexington puckered her forehead and with a long-suffering sigh, turned a quizzical gaze to Amelia. “But I don’t understand! You specifically said―”