The Ugly Duchess

by Eloisa James

  Night fell with the Percival towing the Flying Poppy, their respective crews conducting their business in an orderly fashion (albeit with a few pirates looking over Squib’s shoulder).

  James and his cousin, whom he had reverted to addressing by his given name, continued drinking.

  “Can’t drink like this normally,” Griffin muttered at some point. “Captain can’t fraternize with his men.”

  “I’ll remember that,” James said, slurring his words a bit. “Do you remember what we did when we first met?”

  “Climbed up on the roof,” Griffin said after a brief pause to recollect, “slung a rope from one of the chimneys, climbed down far enough to bang on the nursery windows and try to scare your nanny to death.”

  “That was the plan,” James agreed, taking another slug of cognac. They drank straight from the bottles. “Didn’t work out that way.”

  “My sister ran around shrieking, but yours didn’t. She opened the window, remember? I thought she was pulling us in, but instead she threw a basin of water at us, laughing as if she was cracked. She could have killed us.”

  “Not my sister,” James said rather owlishly. “I married her. She’s my wife.” Before he knew it, he found himself talking, for the first time, about what had happened nine months before. It spilled from his mouth. Not all of it—not what he and Daisy had been doing in the library—but enough.

  “Damnation,” Griffin exclaimed. “She heard it, all of it?”

  The ship caught the side of a wave and James nearly fell from his chair, but he managed to catch himself. “Drunk as a stoat,” he muttered to himself. “She heard every word. Told me never to come back. I took over the Percival the next morning.”

  “I’ve got a wife somewhere, too,” Griffin said, not sounding in the least regretful at having misplaced her. “Better off without.”

  With rather elaborate care, they clinked their bottles. “Here’s to the Poppy,” James said.

  “And the Poppy Two,” Griffin added. “See this?”

  He tapped the wrong cheek, but James understood what he meant and felt a surge of apprehension. No tattooed man could ever return to English society. Tattooed men did not bow before the queen, nor dance the minuet at Almack’s, nor kiss their wives goodnight.

  There were times, in the dark of the night, when he yearned for Daisy so much that he could hardly breathe. Times when he thought he must return to her, beg her to take him back, sleep at her doorstep if need be. They had been friends his entire life, after all, and lovers . . .

  He still woke up shaking and aroused from dreams of her.

  But if he were tattooed, those dreams would be over. There could be no prospect of going back. And that’s what she wanted.

  She had told him to never come back, that she never wanted to see his face again. Daisy never said anything she didn’t mean. She was straight as an arrow. Not like him.

  “Right,” he said, standing up with hardly a wobble. “Have to board your ship, I suppose. Gotta get my tattoo so I can be a real pirate.”

  “You can come over there, but no poppy,” Griffin said. “You have to earn your tattoo. You can’t just get one for the asking.”

  James nodded. “Damn, my head is starting to ache.”

  “Three bottles of cognac,” Griffin said, standing as well. He lurched against the wall. “I don’t hold my liquor so well anymore. Did I tell you never to drink with the crew?”

  James nodded, which made his head throb. “I’ll learn it all,” he said.

  Back on the deck, the sea air woke them up.

  “How are we going to get to your ship?” James said. The Poppy had drawn close to the Percival earlier, close enough that the pirates had easily leapt from their deck, caught the Percival’s railing, and swung over. But now the two ships were tethered with a good distance between them, sails furled.

  With a wild shout, Griffin kicked off his boots and launched himself straight over the railing and down into the blue water.

  “Mad,” James muttered. English lords didn’t do more than dip in the ocean, though, of course, he could swim.

  But over he went, dropping into water as warm as a bath, stroking after his cousin, who swam not like a fish but like a shark.

  Then up a rope ladder, hand over hand nearly as fast as Griffin. James’s head had cleared, and he was almost sober as he pulled himself over the railing.

  For all the brandy and the bonhomie, Griffin was a pirate lord.

  His pirates were clustered around him now. They turned as James drew himself upright, dripping.

  Griffin’s face was different in the midst of his men: it was sinister and grim, without a trace of his fine breeding to be seen. “This is my cousin,” he stated. The pirates nodded, though a few narrowed their eyes. “He’ll be captaining the Poppy Two. You can call him The Earl.”

  They went below to Griffin’s cabin, where Griffin threw James some dry clothes: rough clothes, fit for a fight at sea. Without ceremony, he took a pair of scissors and chopped off James’s hair above his ears. “The last thing you want is some cutthroat to jerk you backward by your pretty locks,” he explained.

  James looked at himself in the glass and approved. Not a trace of an English earl looked back at him. He looked like a man who cared for no one, not for his wife or his family or his heritage.

  That wasn’t quite true, but he could make it true.

  Now he was a pirate.

  One year later

  Using their perfected (and extremely successful) pincer action, the Flying Poppy and the Poppy Two had just divested yet another pirate ship, the Dreadnaught, of her ill-gotten gains. Pallets of teakwood and barrels of China tea were now nestled in the hold of the Flying Poppy together with the Dreadnaught’s crew, their ship having followed the body of their captain, Flibbery Jack, into the depths of the Indian Ocean.

  Griffin and James were sprawled in Griffin’s cabin, celebrating their latest conquest with a glass or two of cognac. After that first night together, they had not overindulged again; it wasn’t in their natures.

  “We’re surprisingly alike,” James said, following that thought to its logical conclusion.

  “Damn good sailors,” Griffin replied. “Just when I think that the P-Two can’t possibly sidle up where I’d like her to, you manage it.”

  “Pity about those men.”

  “The dead ones?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t lose any of our own. And the crew of the Dreadnaught were feared through the East Indies,” Griffin pointed out. “We’ve done the world a favor. Another favor, given that we scuttled the Black Spider last month. And may I point out that the Dreadnaught gained her reputation by capturing a passenger ship bound for Bombay and walking every single man, woman, and child down the plank?”

  “I know it,” James said. All his research on pirates and their routes had served them well in the last few months. The Poppys were now as feared by pirates as pirates were feared by trading vessels.

  “We’re bloody Robin Hoods, we are.”

  “With the tiny exception that we don’t give to the poor,” James said dryly.

  “We returned that golden statue to the King of Sicily. We could have sold it.” Griffin was not one for the magnanimous gesture.

  “Ferdinand’s letter giving us the right to fly his flag as privateers is worth more than Saint Agatha, even if the statue wasn’t hollow—which it was, may I point out.”

  Griffin just shrugged. He didn’t like giving anything away for free, but even he had to admit that privateers lived an easier life than pirates, though the distinction was certainly a foggy one.

  “What are you going to do with all that fabric you put in your cabin, by the way?” he asked. “Are you planning to lure a woman on board? The men won’t hold with it. The first storm that hit, you’d look around for your popsy and find they’d tossed her overboard to appease the sea devils, or Poseidon, or what have you.”

  “I thought I’d send the fabric to m
y wife. She always talked about cloth more than she did dresses themselves, and the silks are lovely. The Dreadnaught must have caught a silk trader.”

  “Why on earth would you do such a thing?” Griffin asked, clearly astonished. “She booted you out the door, and quite rightly, from what you said. Why remind her of your miserable existence?”

  “Good question,” James said, throwing back his cognac. “Forget the fabric; we must do something with the gold.”

  “Bank it,” Griffin said promptly. “When I think of the way I used to simply stash it in a cave before you came along, it makes me twitch all over. Shall we stow it in Genoa or open a new account somewhere else?”

  “I’m worried about our account in that Paris bank, given Napoleon’s sticky fingers,” James said. “I think we’d better head there and close that account. We’ll put the lot in Genoa.”

  Griffin put his empty glass to the side and stood. “Look, James, I have some bad news. The bos’un on the Dreadnaught was taken on in Bristol two months ago, and he had this.”

  He walked to the sideboard, picked up a newspaper lying there, and handed it to James. A black-bordered notice announced that the Duke of Ashbrook had died suddenly.

  James stared down at the paper. His father was dead, and had been for two months. Just like that, his world changed. Then, after a few seconds, he rose, quite calmly, and said, “I’ll go back to the Poppy Two and tell the men that we’re en route for Marseille. We’d better swap out the sails and turn into privateers.”

  Griffin gave him a swift punch in the arm. “Don’t think I’m going to ‘Your Grace’ you. Do you suppose the men will catch on if we announce your name is changing to Duke? Earl doesn’t really seem fitting for one of your grand stature.”

  James didn’t bother to answer. He climbed the stairs wearily. They had a crew member whose only job was to row back and forth between the Poppys, and a moment later he was once again crossing the short distance. Dusk had fallen, and the ocean seemed drained of color and detail, as if the rowboat plowed through a gray mist.

  Back in his own cabin, he felt so exhausted that he dropped on the bunk without undressing. It had been a long, grueling day: from the moment a pirate ship was spied, he and the other men often didn’t sleep for forty-eight hours, a period of tense watchfulness that generally culminated in a bloody battle. Pirates always fought hard, and beating them was a ruthless, hand-to-hand business. Today’s taking of the Dreadnaught had followed the pattern.

  Despite his physical exhaustion, his mind felt frozen, unable to think of anything but his father’s death. His man appeared with a basin of hot water before quietly departing. James heaved himself from the bunk and stripped off his clothing, memories ricocheting around his brain.

  He had spent a good deal of his life loathing his father, but he had never thought of him not being there. Never. The duke wasn’t terribly old, but then James remembered the purple color in his cheeks during his attacks of rage. His heart had burst, no doubt.

  And yet . . . and yet for all his father had done, James had never truly questioned whether he loved him, James, his son and heir, his only child. The duke was a fool, a gamester, a reckless man who trampled the feelings of those around him. And yet he did love James. The fact that he had died without knowing that his son was alive or dead: that felt like a knife under James’s ribs.

  The memories flooded in, and not those to do with stealing Daisy’s dowry or anything like that. No, they were the way his father used to burst into the nursery and swing him onto his shoulder; the way he’d let him hide under his desk so that his tutor couldn’t find him; the way he’d show up at Eton completely unannounced and use his title to bully his way into the classroom and then take James and all his friends out boating on the river Thames.

  Grief was locked together with guilt. The two emotions sat at the base of his chest like a stone, telling him that his father died broken-hearted.

  He knew it.

  He should have . . . He should have . . . What? It hardly mattered now. He had done nothing. And the duke was gone. As lost to James now as his mother was.

  Daisy would have managed it all, the funeral, and the rest of it. Daisy would have made sure her father-in-law, no matter how despised, had a proper monument.

  His sponge bath finished, he stared at the pile of fabric in the corner as he dried himself. He was desperate to think about anything other than his father’s death.

  The fabrics glimmered like the souks of North Africa and the bazaars of India from which they’d come. His gaze fixed on one cloth that captured the pale blue of a hot summer day in England, when the sky seems so high and far away that it might as well be heaven.

  Even as he stared, willing his mind blank, he could almost hear his father screaming at him, telling him to stop being a horse’s arse and come back, face his responsibilities, take over the dukedom.

  Yet now that voice was forever silenced. James’s memories of his father felt useless and far away, as if England were no more than a kingdom under the sea, a land of fishes where he would fit in as well as a trout behind the pulpit of St. Paul’s.

  The hell with it.

  He had stopped dreaming of Daisy, but that didn’t mean he’d stopped thinking of her altogether. He still did, though mostly alone in his bunk, when recovering from a knife wound.

  If he were given the chance to do it over, he wouldn’t have fled England. He would have carried his wife upstairs and thrown her on the bed, and made her understand how he felt about her. But it was too late for that: those dreams were as dead as his father.

  There was nothing in England for him. He had to be gone seven years before they could declare him dead. Well, in a mere month or two, he would have been at sea for two years. Pinkler-Ryburn was a decent fellow; he’d assume the title in five years if James failed to return. Then Daisy could marry again. Severing all ties to England would extinguish, for once and all, this odd and shameful longing to return home to her.

  He could hear Daisy’s voice as clear as a bell in his ear when she had told him their marriage was over. And when she had said that another man would fall in love with her, a better man than he.

  That was easy enough to imagine. James had never loathed anyone as much in his life as he loathed himself.

  He shouted, and his man popped in the door. “Throw that lot overboard,” he ordered, nodding at the cloth. The man gathered the cloth into his arms and scurried from the cabin.

  An hour later, James had a shaved head and a small poppy tattooed beneath his right eye. He appropriated a name from Flibbery Jack, the pirate captain who would no longer be needing it, and gave it to himself.

  Long live Jack Hawk.

  Because James Ryburn, Earl of Islay and Duke of Ashbrook, was dead.

  Fifteen

  June 1811

  Ryburn House, Staffordshire

  Duchy of Ashbrook

  Theo ran a hand through her short hair, loving the fact that her head felt light and free. She’d cropped her hair the day after her marriage fell apart, and she had never regretted it. “What did you say, Mama? I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”

  “May I offer you a piece of apple cake?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You must eat,” Mrs. Saxby said rather sharply, handing Theo a piece of cake nonetheless. “You do nothing but work, darling. Work, work, work.”

  “There’s a great deal of work to be done,” Theo said reasonably. “And you must admit that it’s all going quite well, Mama. We are producing our very first ceramics sometime this month. And the Ryburn Weavers has fourteen new orders. Fourteen!” She couldn’t help a triumphant grin at the very thought.

  “That’s all very well,” Mrs. Saxby said, “but you look almost gaunt. It’s not becoming.”

  Theo let that pass. After a few months that she still hated to think about, she had settled into acceptance of her “ugly” status. When James had fled London, the ton assumed, quite naturally, that he couldn’t cont
emplate more than two days of marriage to an ugly duchess-to-be. No one talked of anything else for a good month, evidenced by what gossip filtered its way into the newspapers. Theo had not been there to experience the firestorm in person; she had left the city the same day James did, retreating to Staffordshire, where her mother had joined her after returning from Scotland.

  By the time people discovered that James had taken the Percival and set off for foreign parts, she was safely ensconced in the country and, though occasional sorties to London were unavoidable, she hadn’t ventured back into polite society—the very word made her lip curl—since.

  “Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn’s wedding is approaching,” her mother insisted. “We must both look our best.”

  “As I said when the invitation first arrived, I see no reason why I should attend the wedding of my husband’s putative heir to the cretinous Claribel. Besides,” she added more reasonably, “it would take nearly a week, since the nuptials are being held in Kent. I couldn’t possibly spare the time; August is a very busy month.”

  Mrs. Saxby’s teacup joined its saucer with a bit more force than necessary. “Darling, I hoped not to have to say this to you, but you are growing rigid.” Her hair had turned a little gray, and she’d lost some of the bounce in her step after her son-in-law’s dramatic departure, but she had never weakened in her adherence to courtesy. “You must attend as a representative of the duchy. And because Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn is a very good man.”

  “His worth has nothing to do with it,” Theo said. “I simply cannot hare off to a wedding when I need to be here.” She could be quite as stubborn as her mother.

  “You have taken a very pinched view of life,” Mrs. Saxby continued. “You may have had an unhappy experience of marriage, but is that a reason to turn into a sharp-tongued, unhappy woman?”

  “I’m not unhappy,” Theo said, adding honestly, “most of the time. Besides, happiness is not something one can control.”

  “I disagree. Life dealt you a few blows. But what happened to the daughter I used to know? Where is your list of style rules? You always said that as soon as I stopped dictating your apparel, you were going to throw your pearls to the swine, and so on. I didn’t always agree, but I was very interested to see what you would make of yourself.”