The Ugly Duchess

by Eloisa James

  The duke loved to carry his wife about. “Putting those muscles of his to good use,” the maids whispered to each other, giggling madly.

  Marriage was not easy, but neither was it unrewarding. In fact, James had grinned all afternoon following the demise of the china fish, even though he was dreading the evening. He was to receive a commendation for meritorious duties to the Crown in the unfortunate matter of the slave trade, and the ceremony was to be followed by a ball. He loathed that sort of occasion, but if putting on a sash and wearing an absurd costume for one evening would help him win the upcoming vote on abolishing slavery (rather than just the slave trade) throughout the British empire, it was the least he could do. At least they’d waived the ritual purification by bathing; that was something for which to be grateful.

  Besides, Theo wanted him to accept it. And what Theo wanted, James gave her, to the best of his power. Even when it meant he felt as ridiculous as a peacock draped in a velvet stole.

  Thus, he was now standing in his bedchamber while his valet, Gosffens, fussed over him. He had already put James in a doublet sewn all over with pearls, and then a surcoat of red tartarin, lined and edged with white sarcenet. That was followed by a white sash, which was bad enough, but now Gosffens had brought out boots adorned with huge golden spurs, practically as large as wagon wheels.

  James peered down at them with distaste. “Where did that vulgar rubbish come from?”

  “Specially made for the Knights of the Bath,” his valet stated.

  James jammed his feet into the boots.

  “And now the Mantle of the Order,” Gosffens said in a hushed voice. He reverently shook out a mantle of the same color as the surcoat and tied it around James’s neck with a length of white lace.

  James glared at the mirror as if daring it to crack in two. “White lace, Gosffens? White lace? I look like a horse’s arse.”

  Gosffens was lifting the lid from yet another box. James glanced over—and realized his valet was removing a red bonnet. A bonnet?

  He put up with a lot in the area of dress. His wife had decided opinions, and she loved nothing more than to dress him in velvet and silk, in colors not generally seen on men and sometimes embroidered with flowers; she said that the more extravagant his clothing, the more piratical he appeared. Once James discovered just how seductive his duchess found that piratical look, he had even been known to wear a coat in a subtle shade of pink.

  But a bonnet was going too far. James held out his hand without a word. Gosffens handed it to him, and then watched with a tragic expression as James ripped it straight down the middle and tossed it out the window.

  “Your ceremonial bonnet,” the valet wailed.

  “I’ll let you put on a wig,” James said, by way of compromise.

  Gosffens came at him next with a stickpin topped with a diamond the size of a large grape.

  “Where did that monstrosity come from?” James said, waving it away.

  His valet gave him a smug smile. “It is a gift from Her Grace, in honor of your investiture as a Knight of the Bath.”

  James sighed, and Gosffens stabbed it into the crimson mantle. “After all, you are the pirate duke,” his man said. “We must not disappoint your followers.”

  For his part, James would be perfectly happy to disappoint anyone stupid enough to give a hang about what he was wearing. “I suppose the duchess will be particularly magnificent this evening?”

  “I believe they began the dressing process at one o’clock,” Gosffens affirmed. James’s valet received a good deal of his sense of self-worth from the fact that he lived under the roof of the most stylish woman in London. One o’clock was three hours ago, and James thought it likely that Daisy wouldn’t be ready for another hour.

  In the end, the ceremony wasn’t too intolerable. The Regent was mercifully brief in bestowing the Order of the Bath. At the ball that followed, James accepted the congratulations of eleven fatuous knights who were convinced that the twelve of them were the cream of the kingdom. Successfully suppressing the impulse to laugh aloud, he used his new knightly influence to push Sir Flanner (knighted for service in the war) toward support of his anti-slavery bill, so that was a night’s—or knight’s—work well done.

  By then James had long since lost track of his duchess. Theo was in high demand among the ton. The papers described her every opinion and new gown; he himself never seemed to be able to leave his own front door without brushing up against members of the penny press waiting to see his wife.

  Far too often for his own taste, a bored reporter would amuse himself by writing up another description of the pirate duke, with his “brutal” tattoo. Those articles invariably ended with some variation on the same theme: no one could understand how the most elegant woman in London tolerated marriage to the most uncouth man in the peerage.

  But at the same time, no one could argue with the fact Her Grace obviously adored her husband. The duchess didn’t smile often, but she smiled for the duke.

  Personally, James thought her face in repose was lovely, but when she smiled—especially at him—it was extraordinary.

  Thinking of that, he began to look for her with more purpose. They’d been here at least two and a half hours, and he and Theo had negotiated a three-hour limit for social occasions involving more than ten persons. (The duchess may have abandoned her Rules in the bedchamber, but she was still given to them in other aspects of her life. One of these days he was going to stop dropping the newspapers on the breakfast room floor.)

  He poked his head into the drawing room, but there was no sign of his wife. He looked in the card rooms, and the ballroom, and she didn’t seem to be there, either. There was nothing for it but to extend his search to the floor above.

  He was dawdling in the long gallery, looking at the portraits of pompous royalty, when he heard Geoffrey Trevelyan’s drawling voice around the corner. For all James despised the man, Theo insisted on dancing with him now and then. James was of the considered opinion that she did it because she knew that it drove him mad.

  Just as he turned on his spurred heel to head in the other direction—he took the avoidance of Sir Geoffrey to the level of art—he made out what Trevelyan was saying in that arrogant manner of his.

  “The Ugly Duchess might as well be wearing the Emperor’s new clothes.” This, with a snigger. “All the fine clothing in the world can’t give her the figure of a woman, or the profile of one. I really think that she might be a man. You know the reputation that pirates—”

  At that precise moment James rounded the corner. Trevelyan, aghast, snapped his mouth shut.

  Just because a man has learned to control his temper doesn’t mean that he isn’t capable of losing it when circumstances demand. James twisted his former schoolmate’s cravat around his hand, hoisted him into the air, and slammed him against the wall, bellowing at the top of his lungs. “How dare you say such a thing about my wife? You foul, malicious piece of garbage. You cur, unfit to be in her presence.”

  Trevelyan’s face was turning an interesting color of plum, and he seemed disinclined to answer, possibly because the cravat was cutting off his air supply. That was all right: James’s question was rhetorical.

  He slammed Trevelyan against the wall again. “She is the most beautiful”—slam!—“exquisite”—slam!—“woman in all of London.”

  By now James could hear people rushing up the stairs, but he didn’t care. “I never saw a woman more beautiful, not in China,”—slam!—“not in the Indies,”—slam!—“and certainly not in the British Isles. Even more important, she is incredibly kind. Witness the time she wastes talking to you, you spiteful, shriveled worm.” Slam, slam, slam!

  A hand touched his sleeve, and he turned, teeth bared. It was Theo.

  “Dear heart,” she said, and with just those two words, the rage drained from him and he dropped Trevelyan like a piece of discarded laundry.

  The spiteful worm instantly began to crawl away. “You!” James said, in precisely the
same voice with which he used to roar some version of “Time to die!” as he leapt over a ship’s rail.

  Trevelyan heard and understood; he froze.

  “If you ever utter a word about my wife that is less than complimentary, I will not slam you against the wall again. I will instead send you through a window. And not on the ground floor, either.”

  James didn’t wait for an answer; who expects garbage to answer back? Instead, he held out his arm to his wife.

  When they turned, they saw that the gallery was now crammed with people.

  “My duchess,” James stated, his eyes sweeping the crowd with the air of a man who has ruled the waves. “She is not a swan, because that would imply she had once been an ugly duckling.”

  He glanced down at Theo. Her eyes were painted with an exotic tilt at the corners. Her cheekbones were regal and her bottom lip was colored a perfect red that made it more kissable than it already was. Small but lush breasts, skin the color of clear moonlight, rose above a waist the size of a man’s hand.

  But none of that mattered compared to the innate kindness in her eyes, the joyful turn of her lip, the wild intelligence with which she greeted every day.

  That was beautiful.

  Without another word, they walked down the long gallery, Theo’s fingers poised on his sleeve, the crowd parting like the Red Sea as they approached. James saw approval on their faces, and then someone began to clap. It may even have been the Regent himself.

  Two hands clapping became several, and then more, and finally they descended the stairs to the sound of a ballroom full of peers applauding.

  Safe in the carriage while being driven home, Theo managed to stop herself from crying. James asked her if she was all right, but words were so bundled in her heart that she couldn’t utter them, and she just nodded and held his hand very, very tightly.

  Once inside the house, she handed her cape to Maydrop, caught James’s hand before he had removed his greatcoat, and wordlessly led him to the foot of the staircase. He followed her up, his coat still on, with a bellow of laughter.

  She remained silent when they were in her bedchamber, and the door was closed behind them. For a precious moment she allowed herself to just look at her pirate. James’s elegant features were still there. His tattoo only emphasized the sweep of his lashes, the curve of his lip, the arch of his cheekbones.

  As he shrugged off his greatcoat, she reached up to pull off his wig, then tossed it aside. He was huge, and beautiful, with a contained power about him that had made a shipful of pirates—and a crowded room of lords—acquiesce to whatever he proposed.

  He was hers.

  “Are you angry that I slammed Trevelyan about a bit?” James asked, even though in this one matter he obviously didn’t give a damn what she thought, and would do it again in a heartbeat.

  She took a moment to find the right words. “You told the whole world that I was beautiful to you.”

  “You are,” he said simply. “Not just to me, either.”

  Tears threatened to fall again, but again she willed them away. James was lounging back against the door like the pirate king he was, his expression wicked and tender, both at once.

  “I always thought,” she said haltingly, “that you started loving me when you were blind, when you were twelve. Because you couldn’t see me.”

  His eyebrow shot up. “Rubbish. I loved you long before.”

  “You did?”

  “The year before, when my mother died. You came to me that night. Don’t you remember? You were still in a small bed in the nursery, and I had graduated to a larger bed next door. You came to my room without a word, after Nurse retired for the night, and you crawled in bed with me. I started crying then, and I sobbed until I didn’t have another tear in me.”

  “I’d forgotten that,” Theo said, remembering now.

  “But do you know why I fell in love with you?”

  There was a shining glint of impious laughter in his eyes. She shook her head.

  “Because you brought eight handkerchiefs to my bed with you. Eight. And precisely eight starched handkerchiefs later, I felt able to live another day.”

  She couldn’t stop her smile. “I like to be prepared.”

  “You knew me.” His eyes were naked and vulnerable. “All through my life, you’ve been my lodestone, the key to my heart. I lost you for a while, Daisy.” He straightened and went to her. “I couldn’t bear it if I lost you again.”

  “You won’t,” she whispered, pulling his head down to hers.

  One of the moments that Theo—or Daisy, as her husband persisted in calling her—remembered throughout her entire life came later that night.

  They were sprawled on the bed. As usual, one of the sheets trailed on the floor. The duchess’s hair was standing up on one side. The duke was complaining that he’d pulled a muscle in his left hip and it was her fault, because “no man was meant to bend in that fashion.”

  Theo gave her husband a kiss, and told him a secret that she had kept nestled in her heart, waiting until she was absolutely certain. “And you,” she stated, “will be the most wonderful father this baby could possibly have had.”

  James couldn’t seem to find any words. He stared at her for a moment, then sat back against the headboard and gently eased her between his legs, spreading his huge hands on her belly.

  As she relaxed happily against his shoulder, to her utter astonishment, he began to sing. His voice was nothing like the clear tenor he’d once had. It was the voice of a man who’d been to sea; it sounded like brandy and sin.

  “Dance with me,” he sang, “to the end of life.”

  He paused after that line and whispered in her ear. “That means that you and I will dance down the days of this life together, and perhaps even beyond.” He dropped a kiss on her nose and sang on, his hands tenderly resting on her still-flat stomach. “Dance me to our children, who are waiting to be born.”

  Theo swallowed her tears and raised her voice to sing with him, her clear soprano entwining with his imperfect—but oh, so beautiful—bass.

  “Dance with me,” they sang together, “to the end of life.”

  It was the first of many songs that James sang for their firstborn, and their second born, and for the third and fourth, who came as a matched set. The children knew that their father didn’t like to sing. But they also knew that if their mother asked him . . . well, Papa never could say no to her.

  So together the family danced and sang—a pirate and a duchess, a duke and an artist, a man and a woman—down the many days and byways of a long and happy life.

  Historical Note

  All my novels have drawn inspiration from a combination of literary fiction, historical facts, and elements of my own life (my husband would be the first to point out that Theo’s wish to catalog her ribbons is duplicated in my own shelves). The Ugly Duchess obviously follows that pattern, in that its greatest debt is to the story “The Ugly Duckling,” written by the Danish poet and storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen’s fairytale was published in 1843, making use of it here anachronistic, for which I beg forgiveness. I wanted to place my story in the Regency, and more precisely, I wanted Theo to be in Paris after the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau.

  At the same time, this novel is my first to have received inspiration from a living person outside my own family (I don’t count Sir Justin Fiebvre, in The Duke Is Mine; while Justin Bieber is obviously inspirational to many, Sir Justin was a minor character). Some time ago, my attention was caught by an article describing the “Rules” created by the fascinating, eclectic, and altogether magnificent Iris Apfel. Theo came up with rules suited to her own time and place, but Iris’s (“Visit the animal kingdom”) served as a jumping-off point. Another source of fashion advice was Genevieve Antoine Dariaux’s A Guide to Elegance: For Every Woman Who Wants to be Well and Properly Dressed on all Occasions. Elegance, Dariaux announces, is harmony, a lesson that Theo took to heart.

  I want to add that the chapte
r set in the House of Lords owes much to a similar scene depicted in Dorothy Sayers’s Clouds of Witness (1926). And finally, Sir Griffin Barry is modeled on a real life pirate from the Renaissance, a young reprobate who was a playwright and a gentleman, as well as a pirate.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Eloisa James’s

  The Duke Is Mine

  Once upon a time, not so very long ago . . .

  (or, to be exact, March 1812)

  . . . there was a girl who was destined to be a princess. Though to be absolutely precise, there was no prince in the offing. But she was betrothed to a duke’s heir, and from the point of view of minor gentry, a coronet was as good as a crown.

  This story begins with that girl, and continues through a stormy night, and a series of tests, and if there’s no pea in the tale, all I can say is that if you read on, you will encounter a surprise in that bed: a key, a flea—or perhaps a marquess, for that matter.

  In fairy tales, the ability to perceive an obtrusion as tiny as a pea under the mattress is enough to prove that a strange girl who arrives on a stormy night is indeed a princess. In the real world, of course, it’s a bit more complicated. In order to prepare for the rank of duchess, Miss Olivia Mayfield Lytton had learned something from virtually every branch of human knowledge. She was prepared to dine with a king, or a fool, or Socrates himself, conversing on subjects as far-flung as Italian comic opera and the new spinning machines.

  But, just as a single dried pea was all that was needed to determine the authenticity of the princess, one crucial fact determined Olivia’s eligibility for the rank of duchess: she was betrothed to the heir to the Canterwick dukedom.

  Less important were the facts that when this tale begins Olivia was twenty-three and still unmarried, that her father had no title, and that she had never been given a compliment such as a diamond of the first water. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  None of that mattered.