The Worst Duke in the World

by Lisa Berne

  “I was thinking about you.”

  “Were you really?”

  “Yes.” Jane straightened up and smiled at him.

  “In a good way?”

  “In a very good way. Anthony, do you remember that night, all those months ago, when you climbed up to my room back in London?”

  “I’ll always remember it.”

  “So will I. Do you also happen to recall wanting to give me a gift—something that was in your greatcoat pocket? Something to commemorate our private understanding?”

  Jane watched as Anthony’s dark-blue eyes did that marvelous thing again: somehow both darkening and filling with light. She would never, ever tire of seeing them do that.

  “Yes,” he answered. “I certainly do.”

  Anthony was already standing fairly close to her, but Jane took a step that brought them even closer, which was much better. “Well,” she said, “I’d love to have it, whenever you’re ready to give it to me.”

  “Funny you should ask, Jane, as I’ve been carrying it with me everywhere. And this is the perfect place to give it to you.”

  “How so?”

  “You’ll see.” Anthony pulled from his greatcoat pocket a small square box which was about the size of his palm, and held it out to Jane. She took it, blew off the dog hairs, and looked up at him again. “Chocolates?” she said softly, teasingly.

  The corners of his attractive mouth quirked. “No, not chocolates this time.”

  Jane lifted the lid, and saw, nestled on crimson velvet, a necklace made of perfect, iridescent pearls. She caught her breath. “Oh, Anthony, how beautiful.”

  “I saw it in a shop window in London and knew right away that it was meant for you.”

  “I love it. I love you. Thank you very much. Will you put it on me?”

  “With pleasure.”

  Jane held the box and watched in awe as Anthony delicately worked the clasp, put it behind her neck to fasten it, and then brought the gleaming strand to lay on the breast of her pelisse. “Oh, Anthony, thank you. I’ll cherish it forever. And you also.” She slid her arms around him, went up on her toes, and kissed him soundly.

  When finally they broke apart, Anthony said, his eyes filled with light, “Jane, does this mean you’re accepting my proposal?”

  “Yes. I’m sure now. If you are?”

  “Very sure. Oh, Jane, very, very sure.” Now he was the one kissing her, and Jane felt so happy that she had to end the kiss so she could laugh out loud with the joy that was filling her up to the brim and beyond.

  “Jane, would you say it again?”

  “That I love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you, Anthony Farr.”

  “And I love you, Jane Kent. With all my heart and soul. Have you figured out why this is the perfect place for you to receive your gift?”

  Jane shook her head, smiling, and Anthony tilted his head toward the Duchess, who was now lying against the brick wall of the pig-cote, ensconced in clean, fresh straw, snoring gently, and as humble and radiant as ever. He said:

  “Pearls before swine.”

  Jane laughed again, and Anthony did also, and after that they had to kiss again for a while but broke apart when they heard pleasant crunching sounds and saw Wakefield loping toward them, his boots flattening the dry winter leaves, all the dogs trotting and adorably lolloping alongside him. He had gotten taller this winter, and now, at nine years old, his fine-boned face had lost a little of its boyishness, but none of its charm. He came near and said:

  “I say, were you two kissing?”

  “Yes,” answered Anthony.

  “Does this mean you’re going to get married?”

  It was Jane who answered this time. “Yes. We love each other very much. I do hope you don’t mind, Wakefield.”

  “Not a bit of it. You’re much better than all those other ladies Aunt Margaret brought over. They were awfully boring, and you’re not. Jane, does this mean you love me too?”

  “Yes, dear Wakefield,” Jane said, and went over to where he stood with Joe the dog who had happened to sit on his boot, and she continued: “Very much. May I give you a hug?”

  “Yes.”

  Jane hugged him, and he hugged her back, and then he said:

  “Well, that’s jolly. I’ll like having you for a mother, Jane. What shall I call you?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “Now, that’s going a bit too far,” said Anthony. “What if Wake chooses ‘Sniffer-crumble,’ or ‘Lollygriggin’? Or ‘Tootle-face’?”

  “Oh, Father, don’t be ninsonsical.”

  “Do you mean nonsensical?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said. I’ll keep on calling you ‘Jane’ for now, Jane, but I might change my mind later on.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I say, were you eating blancmange?” He was peering at the empty bowls on the tray.

  “Yes,” Anthony replied. “Do you want some?”

  “I should say I do. Is there any left?”

  “Of course there is. Shall we go back to the house? I could do with another bowl of it myself. What about you, Jane?”

  “Oh yes, I’d love that.”

  So the three of them, with the dogs in tow, strolled back to the house and ate blancmange in the cheerful family dining-parlor, and had a merry time together suggesting even more preposterous names for Wakefield to call Jane, and Jane had to several times look down at the shimmering necklace of pearls which looked so beautiful against the deep burgundy bodice of her gown, all the while thinking that being filled with love and joy and certainty (and blancmange) was quite possibly the most marvelous sensation in the whole entire world.

  A month later, Anthony and Jane were married.

  Mr. Pressley performed the ceremony, of course, Titania and Lucy were flower-girls, and Wakefield carried the rings with the poise and dignity of a prince, an impression he rather undid when, at the wedding-breakfast, he stood on his head and waved his legs in the air, this delightful feat greatly impressing Titania, Lucy, and little Daniel who insisted on trying it himself, much to the hilarity of the young folk gathered around him.

  Mrs. Henrietta Penhallow was smiling and gracious and genuinely pleased throughout, and Lady Margaret, rather surprisingly, wore a soft plum gown which made everyone suddenly realize that she was very pretty with her shining light-brown hair and blue eyes and graceful figure, and also that she had, in recent months, stopped scowling and frowning quite so much which was such a pleasant change that nobody made the gauche mistake of actually mentioning it in front of her.

  When the breakfast was over and people were saying thank you and congratulations again and what a wonderful ceremony and goodbye, Jane was thankful that her own goodbyes to Great-grandmother, Livia, Cousin Gabriel, and the children only really meant à bientôt, which was “see you soon” in French, a phrase she had memorized early on in her French lessons with Mr. Pressley and which would be continuing even after she became a duchess, because she still had a lot she wanted to learn, and mastering French was one of her new ambitions along with really getting the hang of trigonometry.

  That night, in Anthony’s capacious bedchamber at Hastings that was now her bedchamber also, Jane gave Anthony her wedding-present to him, which was a telescope and which Anthony instantly adored, and he gave her his wedding-present, which was the announcement that he had had a large light-filled room on the same hallway as his library made over to her for her very own library and study, with plenty of shelves for books as well as a magnificent desk and comfortable chair, all of which Jane was sure she would adore the moment she set eyes on them, besides instantly adoring the very idea of it, and they thanked each other copiously. Then, after that, Jane finally learned what Anthony had longed to do that day when he was driving her home to the Hall for the very first time and he had admired her boots and blurted out, I’d like to—well, never mind. Which was that he knelt before her as she sat on the edge of the bed, still clad in her ex
quisite gown of carnation-pink silk and her beautiful pearl necklace which complemented it so well, and he gently pulled off her pink satin slippers, and slid his hands up along her legs in a way that made Jane shiver with delight, and then he undid her garters and drew off her stockings and kissed her bare ankles, and after that he kissed his way up her legs and so on and so forth with a wonderful slowness and skill which was remarkable in someone who had never had the chance to do this before, ever. But, as he modestly told her later on in the evening, when they lay entwined in each other’s arms and magnificently naked and splendidly sweaty and also utterly replete, and she complimented him on how delicious it all was, it must have been, he said, his own pleasure in giving Jane pleasure which made him so good at it, and, of course, practice makes perfect and he was looking forward to a great deal of practicing with Jane.

  Jane immediately said that perhaps they could practice some more right now.

  And they did.

  On successive nights Anthony got to try all the interesting things he had wondered about that evening he and Jane paced around the Hastings ballroom, and Jane showed him some other equally interesting things she liked and thought he might like too. Not only was Anthony a quick learner, he had some innovative ideas of his own, which, as it turned out, Jane liked very much indeed, and so as the nights passed in immense pleasure and bliss and laughter, and the days in more laughter and also work, learning, meals (along with plenty of snacking), reading, riding, billiards, pig-admiring, star-gazing, stone-skipping, and all sorts of other enjoyable pastimes and occupations which included absolutely no sewing at all on Jane’s part, there was also no denying the fact that Anthony and Jane were totally, completely, thoroughly, and entirely right for each other.

  They knew it, and would never forget how lucky they were.

  So Jane became the Duchess of Radcliffe, and for a long time there was pleasant confusion when people talked about the Duchess, because they had to make it clear whether they were talking about the magnificent award-winning pig or Jane, the Duke’s wife and stepmother to Wakefield and also the mother of three additional and equally marvelous children who came along in due course and filled Hastings with laughter, shouting, occasional shrieking, a judicious amount of toys and no more than that, and also a considerable amount of mud and dirt which nobody minded, not even the Duke’s sister Margaret who wasn’t even there anymore, as she had, a year after her brother’s wedding, married Mr. Pressley, with whom she had slowly fallen in love after his spellbinding sermon about redemption and second chances.

  For, secretly stricken by the absence of both Anthony and Wakefield who had gone to London, and who, deep down, she genuinely loved, as well as by guilt at the cruel triumph she had felt at Jane’s departure, and as the final blow the unexpected decampment of her cat to a happier life in Bunch’s pantry, ashamedly she had made her way to Mr. Pressley’s vicarage (having absolutely no one else in whom to confide) and with incredible stiffness and behind a mask of haughty pride had asked if she might speak with him.

  Mr. Pressley had received her with all the kindness and courtesy with which he welcomed all his congregants, and patiently listened, week after week, to Margaret’s grievances, which started out being articulated with a sense of angry ill-usage, gradually shifted to bitter self-pity, and finally evolved into a painful awareness that she had really been wearing black all these years to disguise an even more painful truth, which was that she had loathed her husband the late Viscount Peete but had only married him to please her parents, not herself, and what she had really wanted was an enjoyable Season or two in London during which she could flit from one Society event to another, dance all night, and, hopefully, meet a handsome and intelligent and charming man with whom she could find true love.

  Skiffy Featherington had not been that man.

  He was not only exceedingly stupid, he had also been vain, arrogant, and among the most extreme of the so-called Dandy set—notorious throughout half of England for the immense shoulder-padding in his coats, the soaring height of his shirt-points, the half-dozen fobs jangling from his waist, and the jeweled quizzing-glass he carried with him everywhere including (it was rumored) bed, bathtub, and privy.

  The rumors had been true.

  How many times had Margaret longed to stab him with that ghastly quizzing-glass! His death had not really freed her, but had only allowed her to come back to Hastings and suffer through years of enduring her sister-in-law Selina’s gleeful and vindictive barbs, all concealed beneath a tone of such unctuous concern that Margaret wished she could stab Selina with a quizzing-glass too.

  It was during these conversations with Mr. Pressley that Margaret began to peel away the ugly onion-like layers of guilt, grief, rage, and deceit in which she had been encased for a long, long time, enabling her gradually to see, with fresh eyes, that life could actually be rather a pleasant thing, and that she had never really given her cat the affection it deserved and so it truly was much better off with Bunch and she wished it (and Bunch) well. Also she gradually came to see that Mr. Pressley was clever and learned and kind, with an exceptionally nice face as well as broad shoulders just right for resting one’s weary head upon, plus he was a marvelous dancer, and the moment he confessed that his dour housekeeper Mrs. McKenzie ran roughshod over him, never had the maids dust, and insisted on serving foods which made him bilious, Margaret realized that the love of her life had been right in front of her for years.

  So very bravely she told him that she loved him, and to her enormous relief and even more enormous joy he told her that he loved her too and would like nothing better than to make her his wife and cherish her forever, but could a duke’s daughter find happiness with a mere younger son who was only a country parson?

  Mr. Pressley would have gone on expressing his very noble and honorable doubts at some length, except that Margaret, with even more bravery, stopped his mouth with a kiss, and that was that.

  Shortly thereafter they got married, Margaret moved into the vicarage, found Mrs. McKenzie a better situation elsewhere (with a family which, curiously enough, thrived under her stern and eccentric rule), stopped wearing black and instead wore the pretty colors which suited her so well, had fewer and fewer of those awful headaches, went to London with Mr. Pressley (who, as the son of an earl, knew a great many Society people and could mingle like anything), and did indeed dance all night, several times, which was a lot of fun. She also became, with amazing rapidity, a splendid vicar’s wife who could beautifully organize any event, small or large, at a moment’s notice, was indefatigable in visiting sick parishioners and listening to them sympathetically and offering good advice (which was sometimes even acted upon), and managed to gracefully extract funds for worthy causes from even the most clutch-fisted misers in Somerset. Eventually, thanks to the happiness she had found through love and plenty of meaningful work, she even became friends with her sister-in-law Jane, the Penhallow ladies, and Miss Humphrey and Miss Trevelyan, discovering that as wonderful as it was to have a husband whom she loved with all her heart, it was wonderful to have women-friends, too.

  As for Miss Trevelyan, no sooner had she finished writing up the last of her biographies of Henry Tudor’s wives, the one about Catherine Parr who managed to somehow not get thrown upon the block and have her head chopped off, than she divagated from her usual course as a historian and did indeed try her hand at a novel as she had mentioned, speculatively, upon first meeting Jane.

  She used the Viscount Whitton as the model for her hero, who was a duke and extremely rich and handsome and moody and enigmatic, and who had a tendency to lean elegantly and provocatively against doorway jambs, curl his lip with disdain, fold his arms across his excessively muscled chest, and smolder just like the ashes on a good cigar. Miss Trevelyan also used Jane (with her permission) as the model for her heroine, who was born in the most horrid slum imaginable but turned out to be a princess and who was so delightful and feisty and entrancing that the moody, enigmatic, heavily muscled
duke fell head over heels in love with her, stopped being such a dreadful ass, and proposed to her in the middle of a crowded ballroom, falling to his knees with incredible grace and not even wrinkling his superbly tailored breeches as he did it. Everyone in the ballroom applauded, the duke kissed the princess right then and there, and not only was there not a ghastly scandal as there would be in real life, they got married the very next day and soon had a dozen perfect children and lived happily ever after.

  The book, with the rather unimaginative but at least helpfully explanatory title of The Princess and the Duke, was an immediate success, went through several printings, was translated into seven languages, enabled Miss Humphrey to add on another extension to her flourishing greenhouse, and ultimately earned so much in profits for Miss Trevelyan that she had to go to Jane to help her figure out all the obscure and confusing statements she had been receiving from her publisher, Jane having become well known in the county for her mathematical abilities and how she took over the Hastings accounts and whipped them into shape in no time; which was how Jane discovered that Miss Trevelyan’s publisher had not been dealing fairly with her. So Jane, with all the firmness and resolution native to her both by temperament and experience—one could take the girl out of Nantwich, but one couldn’t entirely take the Nantwich out of the girl, nor should one even try—wrote a couple of very sternly worded letters to Miss Trevelyan’s publisher who was soon reduced to sending long replies of abject apology along with the cheques which were due to Miss Trevelyan accompanied by earnest promises to never do it again. Also the publisher humbly requested additional novels, possibly even something with the enticing title of The Duchess and the Prince, but Miss Trevelyan wrote back with a polite refusal, saying she was returning to history where she really belonged, and thought she would have a go at solving the mystery of King Richard the Third and whether or not he had villainously had his own young nephews murdered in the Tower of London where they had been imprisoned, and if Henry the Seventh was responsible for the widespread and convincing propaganda that his predecessor really had done it, all in the service of glorifying himself and making secure his rather precarious hold on the throne.