by Eloisa James
“I could challenge you for that insult. I’ve knocked on death’s privy and came back to tell the tale, and you’re saying I’m too thin?”
She grinned at him. “Do say that you came to play chess with me? It has been over a month since your fever broke, and that was the length of time for which your doctor issued an embargo on the game, was it not?”
He sat opposite her. She leaned forward, began rearranging the pieces; his large hand came over hers. “Not chess,” he said.
“Not—chess?” If not chess, what? She knew him to be a master at the game, just as she was. What did a master do, but play? “I thought your doctor decreed merely a month without chess; have I mistaken the date?”
He leaned his head back against the chair. “I’ve gone off the game.”
“Impossible!”
“Believe it. I missed it at first, of course. I dreamed of chess pieces, of moves, of games I played or thought I played. But then slowly the urge left me. I’ve decided to take another month at least before returning to the board.”
“You’re voluntarily eschewing chess?”
His smile was a bit rueful. “I can tell you that it lengthens the days. How do people occupy themselves if they’re not chess players?”
Jemma shook her head. “I’ve never known. So how is the party at Fonthill? Wait! Tell me about Harriet.” And she held her breath, not knowing if Villiers was aware that her friend Harriet was having an affaire with the owner of Fonthill, Lord Strange.
“Happy,” he said, “with Strange. But I’m afraid the festivities are dimmed at the moment, as Strange’s daughter is quite gravely ill. I felt it was rude to tax the household with my presence under the circumstances, so I slipped away. I shall return in a day or two when, one hopes, the crisis will be over.”
“Oh dear! What sort of illness has she?”
“A fever caused by a rat bite,” Villiers said. “But the girl is apparently quite strong, and the doctor is sanguine that all will be well. Harriet is spending her time in the sickroom.”
“Of course Harriet would do that,” Jemma said. “It’s the affaire with Strange that I can’t imagine. Isidore said that the air scorched around them.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I had no idea that the duchess was so poetic in her assessments. I gather Strange and Harriet are in love, a foreign emotion for me.” His eyes rested on Jemma. “And how are you?”
She smiled faintly. “Not in love.”
“But not unhappy?”
“No.”
He seemed to take some answer from that, perhaps to a question he wasn’t ready to put into words, for he nodded.
“So what of our match?” she asked, surprised by her own keen disappointment in his refusal of chess.
“One move a day…that match?”
“Yes, that match,” she said. “Do you have so many outstanding matches that you don’t remember? To bring it to your recollection, I have won one game, and you have won one game. That leaves one game to break the tie.”
“I do remember now,” he said, watching her under his eyelids. “Let me see…if our match went to a third game, the last one was to be played blindfolded and in bed.”
“Precisely.” Jemma folded her hands. “I’m so happy that it’s come back to you. I have been training my maid, Brigitte, so she can stand next to the bed and move our pieces appropriately.”
“I did not picture the bedchamber occupied by others than ourselves.”
“Life is positively full of disappointments.”
“Precisely so. I’m sure your maid could use more training. I’d prefer not to play chess for at least another month. Besides, I must return to Fonthill; I didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I feel like an old drunk who’d been sitting on a pub stool next to a man for thirty years, only to be told his comrade has chosen sobriety,” Jemma said, feeling distinctly nettled.
“Chess is better than alcohol…more addictive, more inflammatory, more intelligent.”
She looked at him for a moment, and the edge of her mouth curled up. “You’ll play again.”
“I will trust you to wait for me.”
“I was never very good at waiting for men.” Jemma was startled to hear the words come from her mouth. In one sense, she meant her husband. She waited three years for Elijah to fetch her from Paris when they were young, after she had flung herself across the Channel in a rage. He didn’t visit until the fourth year, and by then it was too late. She had found a lover, and put her marriage behind her.
Villiers’s heavy-lidded eyes dropped. “I, on the other hand, am very good at waiting. For you, Jemma…I would wait quite a long time.”
Jemma woke up. The conversation was happening—perhaps had been happening—on two levels for quite a while and she only now realized it. “Beaumont should be home from Lords within the hour,” she said, watching him. “Will the two of you take your rapprochement from the sickroom to a drawing room?”
Villiers smiled faintly. He didn’t look in the least disappointed by her implicit rejection, which rankled her. Surely he ought to show more response to the invocation of her husband? “Unfortunately, I have a previous engagement. But I wanted your advice. I may have temporarily lost my interest in chess,” he said, “but I am compensating by an increased interest in humanity.”
“You?” she asked, startled.
“Yes. I, the eternal bystander.”
“I always thought you found the affairs of others exhausting and uninteresting. My goodness, Villiers, you’re not planning to reform? I shall be so disappointed if it transpires that the only reason to invite you for an evening is because you lend an air of respectability.”
“It would be a terrible come-down,” he said thoughtfully. “But in truth, I feel no Puritanical leanings.” There was a flare of something deep in his eyes that made her want to smile back, reach out her hand…
“Do ask my advice, then,” she said. “I’m sure I’m capable of wise pronouncements on almost any subject, and yet no one asks for evidence of my wisdom.”
“Beaumont doesn’t come to you with knotty matters of state?”
“Odd, isn’t it?”
“You can mock yourself, Jemma, but he couldn’t find a better mind to consider those affairs.”
Jemma could feel herself growing faintly pink—and she never blushed. Never.
Of course Villiers didn’t miss it. His mouth curled into a mocking smile. “I like blushing,” he said. “Women do entirely too little of it, to my mind.”
“It can be very useful.”
“Useful?”
“There’s nothing more disarming than a woman’s blush.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Most women wear so much face paint that blushing is not an option.”
“I often wear a great deal of face paint,” Jemma said. “Particularly if I think there is the slightest chance that I shall be shocked. If you are bent on reform, Villiers, I shall take to wearing it regularly.”
“Reform…” he said. “Or not.”
He had so much charm. He’d never wielded it on her like this before. When he smiled at her, it was almost like a caress.
Suddenly she remembered his drawling voice saying that he gave her fair warning that he meant to have her.
She almost shivered. Villiers was beautiful, depraved, tired…her husband’s enemy, though she never understood precisely why. She had offered herself to him last year and he had refused on the grounds of being Elijah’s oldest friend. And then he had changed his mind.
Now Villiers apparently meant to woo her, if that word was appropriate for a married woman.
She swallowed. She had promised Elijah that her scandals were over. She had come back from Paris to give her husband an heir. She felt dizzy.
Villiers didn’t seem to notice her silence. Instead he took out a piece of paper. “Read this, Jemma.”
She opened it. The letter was headed with the Duke of Cosway’s crest. “Isidore’s duke!”
“He’s back in the country.”
“I knew that. Isidore is staying with me at the moment. He left her at a hotel, if you can countenance it, Villiers. A hotel! He left his duchess at a hotel and proceeded to drive to the country to see his mother.”
“I find that story unsurprising, given my acquaintance with him. I actually played a game of chess with Cosway on the deck of some rapscallion prince’s boat,” Villiers said.
“On the Nile river?”
“The same hemisphere. If you can imagine, it was twilight and stiflingly hot, around seven years ago, I suppose. I had decided for a number of reasons that I wished to travel to Arabia—”
She shook her head. “No.”
“What?”
“You wanted to play chess, of course. You had no redeeming reason for your journey, such as a love of exploration.”
His smile was a wicked thing, the kind of smile that lured a woman. “You have me with a pawn, Jemma. I wanted to go to the Levant and play the chess masters there. But it was so damned uncomfortable!”
“Sand?”
“Heat.” He stretched out an arm and looked at his lace. “I am a duke. It has been my charge since I was a mere boy, and while it has undoubtedly spoiled me, it has also marked me. I like to be clean, and I like to dress. Even in my bedchamber, if you can believe it, Jemma, I choose my garments with great care.”
She had a sudden entertaining vision of Villiers wrapped in silk. Instinctively, she struck back. “You are so thin after your illness…I wonder that you do not need an entirely new wardrobe.”
“It is a cruel truth,” he sighed. “I seek to build myself up, of course. I am so hopelessly vain that I could never allow myself to visit a lady’s chamber until I am more fit.”
Perhaps that was why there would be no third game in bed. It was to be a long campaign, she thought. The Duke of Villiers was setting himself out to entice her, before he allowed that last game to be played.
Of all the men who had ever assayed that goal, he was the most dangerous.
“So what happened during the chess match with Cosway?” she said, wrenching her mind away from the question of Villiers’s allure.
“Oh, he beat me.”
“That must have been disconcerting.”
“Very. I played like an idiot, and I knew why. It was just too bloody hot for an Englishman, though Cosway showed no signs of discomfort.”
“What kind of man is he?”
“Imagine, if you will, a rather magnificent vessel, belonging to the Bey of Isfaheet. There we sat, with a table of tiger-striped wood between us, the chess pieces carved from the same board. The bishop rode on a rearing lion; the queen was an African princess; the rook was a camel.”
“And you were there, in embroidery and lace…”
“The picture of a proper English duke. No one else on board had a fifth of the clothes I did. And yet I had forsaken my waistcoat.” He opened his eyes very wide. “No waistcoat, Jemma.”
“I appreciate the seriousness of your sacrifice,” she said, laughing.
“It was twilight and the air lay on the river—for we were on a river wider than I’ve seen in England—the air lay on that river like a fat whore on a six-penny bed.”
Jemma snorted.
He looked at her innocently. “Did I say something amiss?”
He was potent…he was so potent in this mood. Wicked and sly and funny. “No,” she said. “Please continue.”
“Every time I reached out my hand to move one of the pieces, drops of sweat ran down my arm.”
“And yet Cosway was not discomforted in the least?”
“Have you met him?”
Jemma shook her head.
“I think it would be fair to say that he’s my opposite. No powder. His skin is brown from the sun, of course and he’s muscled to a degree that is vastly ungentlemanly. But I think it’s the great tumble of inky black hair, unpowdered and not even tied back, that truly marks him. One can easily imagine him fighting off four or five savages at once.”
“You could do that,” Jemma said loyally.
“I’m not such a fool as to ever put myself in that situation,” Villiers said. “As I recall, he wore short trousers that barely reached his knee along with a tunic-like affair, but at some point he removed that and had the boys dunk it in the river. They returned it to him wet. He appeared to be quite comfortable.”
“Unfair!” Jemma said.
“Did I mention that he was barefoot?”
“No. And you?”
“Boots. Sturdy English boots made for an exploring Englishman, out to gather useful knowledge of the world’s fauna and flora.”
“You came home,” Jemma guessed.
“I forsook all the chess games I might have won in the palaces of the great pashas…I succumbed to the heat.”
“Or perhaps,” Jemma said wickedly, “to your insistence on dressing like a duke.”
“It has occurred to me since. Vanity, thy name is Villiers. Do read his letter.”
Jemma had forgotten about it. There was no formal salutation.
Villiers,
I’m having a devil of a time since my return. Would you do me the honor of paying me a visit? There seems to be some disapproval of my ideas. You are, to my mind, the person best suited in the world to advise me on matters of precedence and respectability.
Jemma chuckled.
“I gather you’ve reached the part when he talks about my ability to arbitrate standards of respectability,” Villiers said.
“I was just thinking of you, all booted and laced, on board that ship.”
“The letter continues.”
My mother assures me that I stand to blacken the title of Cosway throughout England for the next hundred years. If you could pay me a visit at Revels House, I would be most grateful.
Yours & etc.
Cosway
Jemma looked up. “What on earth can he be planning? Isidore said that he’d alluded to a wedding celebration that included some sort of animal sacrifice—but he can’t be thinking of enacting a primitive rite here. He would be arrested!”
“Not for animal sacrifice,” Villiers said. “As someone who loves sirloin, I can assure you that many cattle have been sacrificed to keep me happy.”
“You know what I mean,” Jemma said. “And Isidore mentioned orgies.”
“Well, that settles it. I knew you were the person to speak to. I shall have to pay him a visit, if only so that I can be part of the orgy planning.”
“Have you participated in many?”
“Orgies or weddings?” he asked innocently.
“I doubt you have been in any weddings,” she pointed out. “Your engagement to my ward was your first and last, to the best of my knowledge.”
“Alack,” he said. “My experience with orgies is just as thin. This will be such an education for me, combining two pursuits I have religiously avoided.”
“You surprise me,” Jemma said. “I would have thought you had indulged in your youth, and then tired of such passionate pursuits.”
“The problem lies in my dukedom, I suppose, or in my spoiled nature. I have always thought of orgies as opportunities to share—and I don’t do that very well.”
“Then I wonder why you have pursued affaires with married women,” Jemma said.
“Rarely. Very rarely, and only against my better judgment.”
“I see.”
“Only when the temptation is so great that there seemed no other woman in the world,” he added gently.
“Ah.”
“In fact, I must tell you that my reputation may be blacker than I deserve. I have, as yet, had no affaires of that nature.” He rose. “I must continue to my appointment, duchess.”
She stayed in her seat for a moment, then looked up at him. “Leopold.”
Only the lowering of his eyelids showed that he registered her use of his personal name.
But she wasn’t sure exactly what to say.
“I almost forgot,” he said. “I brought you a present.”
She rose, unable to find words, unsure what her response should be. “A present?”
He took out a fan and laid it on the table. “A mere token, a nothing. It made me think of you.” He turned to go.
“Wait—”
He looked back.
“When do you go to Revels House?”
“I shall return to Fonthill tomorrow. If Strange’s daughter is still ill, I shall travel on to Revels House in a few days.”
She nodded.
“I shall make very sure that you are invited to the wedding, naturally.”
“Beaumont and I shall be happy to attend.” She wasn’t sure why she felt the need to bring her husband’s name into the conversation. It wasn’t as if Elijah didn’t—hadn’t—Elijah himself refused to bed her until the chess game with Villiers was over. He understood the potential that she might have an affaire with Villiers.
Jemma sat for a long time after the door closed behind Villiers and his rose-colored silks…thinking of men. Of husbands, lovers, chess masters, heirs.
Of men.
Chapter Nine
Gore House, Kensington
London Seat of the Duke of Beaumont
February 27, 1784
The next morning
Isidore gave the direction to the groomsman, climbed into the carriage, and started pulling off her gloves.
“Do you always take off your gloves whenever possible?” Simeon asked.
Isidore glanced at him. “You aren’t wearing gloves either.” Nor a cravat, nor a wig, nor a waistcoat, but why indulge in specifics?
“I dislike gloves, and it seems you do as well.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
He leaned forward and took her hand, turned it over. His hand was large and callused, like a working man’s hands. He wore no rings, not even a signet.
“Will you tell my fortune?” she asked.
“I don’t know how. I had my fortune told once in India. The whole experience scared me to death and I never toyed with such people again.”
“What did he say?” It was hard to imagine Cosway, who looked large and fearless, quailing before a fortuneteller.