by Eva Devon
Placing her own teacup and lace thin saucer down upon the large, silver service tray embossed with cheeky angels and pomegranates, she snatched his blue and gold cup from his outstretched hand. With extreme ease, she hefted the silver tea pot and poured out. . . Omitting the lemon he always took in his tea. Indubitably, punishment for his purposeful and artificial ignorance. “The dowager of course,” she intoned dramatically. “Who else could cause me so much vexation?”
It never failed to amaze Jack the way in which the fate of the gods worked. He and the baby of the family, his sister Gemma, were his mother’s favorites whereas Charles and his deceased brother Henry had been his father’s and the dowager’s. Lockhart (preposterous name, poor boy) had been the one to fall into the shady regions of general un-appreciation. He often envied the boy their realms of mediocrity in a family known for extremes. As feelings of familial affection went, his mother couldn’t stand his grandmother and the feeling was reciprocated. In fact, the only thing that had kept his mother from a life in the country and been her own strong will and the fact that she’d become the Duchess whilst grandmama, in a bow to tradition, had had to retire in some respects. Still, the old girl ran the family and the dukedom with his gratitude.
Yet, from the beginning, his mother had deeply approved of Jack’s road to sin, if not the reasons for it. And she was now leading Gemma dancing down a similarly decadent path. Frequently, he thanked god he had not been born a daughter, or the youngest. Aside from having let the family heir drown, being born in the middle was a rather nice place to lose oneself.
Jack took the teacup back and perched on the edge of the delicate cream colored French, gold gilded chair, wishing that he hadn’t let his mother furnish his abode. It had seemed a wonderful idea on his twenty-first birthday to make her feel a part of his new establishment. She was a woman of perfect taste, and he hadn’t actually wished to take the time himself to do the townhouse up.
He hadn’t been willing to face the idea of taking up the ducal London house as the duke. It never should have been his. And so, with the building of the large house in the expanding Western part of London, he’d handed the reins over to his mother.
He’d been an idiot to allow it.
As if taking revenge for his departure from her nest, his sitting room was an odd cross between the reception room of the Tsar’s Winter Palace and a Paris brothel. There was gold everywhere, towering ceilings, gilt mirrors, blue and scarlet silk wall hangings, and (he cringed even at the thought of the plethora of cherubs) his rooms were littered with plump cheeked, winged babies of both the facial and rear end variety. Why in god’s name his mother thought he might like cherubs was beyond him.
The large portrait of Venus at her bath hanging above the fireplace? That he did approve of, if only because it sent his grandmother harrumphing every time she came to visit. The old girl really was quite amusing when in a snit. It really was quite shocking what with its odd proportions, lack of romanticism, and the way she actually stared out with her violently dark eyes from the painting as if looking one right in the face. “And what has my dearest Grandmama done now?” he asked, eyeing the lemon, wondering if she would actually smack his hand if he tried for a slice.
Her Grace’s eye actually twitched, the muscles quivering with indignation. “She’s threatening to revoke my entrée into society if I do not curtail my amorous activities.”
Jack snorted tea through his nose. After a few hacks, he swiped the Irish linen napkin, made by prodigiously accomplished nuns (nuns who would have a massive attack of apoplexy if they knew what he had gotten up to on more than one highly pleasurable and creative occasion with said napkins) and wiped the tea from his nose and chin.
This time, her lips twitched, and her sense of aggravation seemed to decrease slightly. “Really, Jack, must you be so provincial?”
“I do beg your pardon mother if I am not yet Parisian enough to speak of my mother’s activities with ease.” He scowled. Though his mother adored speaking of her adventures with his father and other men both titled and common, he’d never quite grown accustomed to it. She was his mother before she was a woman, after all. “It does give one certain disturbing images.”
Her mouth fell open, aghast. “I could never do anything disturbing.”
“Yes,” he agreed quickly, but he was doing everything he could to keep an image of his mother and his father licking champagne off of each other from taking full and scarring form in his brain. After chancing once upon them on a trip home from Eton, he’d learned the extreme importance of making a great deal of noise when entering a room.
“No,” he corrected himself. He opened his eyes as wide as they would go, hoping the sun pouring in the tall windows would eradicate the picture. “Its just that you are my mother.”
“And you think you were delivered in a basket?” Her eyes rolled and she tsked. “I pushed you out over several hours of torture and the recovery of my—”
“Mother!” Jack slammed his teacup on the marble topped side table beside his spindly chair and stared the woman down lest she go into the full and horrifying details about his arrival into this world or the night he was conceived. He knew both stories by heart and really wasn’t desirous of revisiting either, thank you very much.
His mother grinned and smoothed one of her beautiful, slender hands over her sea green taffeta. “It took a great deal of exercise to restore myself to my taut—”
A strangled note rather like a dying pigeon blurted past his lips.
“Jack,” she sighed, annoyance at being cut off in her rapturous account of her difficulties ripe in her voice. “Must you be so innocent?”
His face creased in horror as he desperately tried to scrub the dangerous direction his mother had directed his thoughts from his traumatized mind. “Innocent? Innocent?”
She pursed her slightly rouged lips, lips that most girls in their first season would envy and certainly could never duplicate. Her Grace had only improved with age, much to the delight of the men of London and his grandmother’s feather fluffing annoyance. “Perhaps innocent is a wrongly chosen word, but what else may I speak of with my son if not such natural things as birth and conception?”
Jack snatched a cucumber sandwich from the tray between them and gobbled it, masticating furiously to prevent any ill advised haste in his ability to reply to this preposterous question.
His mother peered at him with innocent eyes over her teacup, her long black lashes batting in that infuriating manner she had, meant to assure those around her that she was completely benign. Benign as a praying mantis.
Jack chewed and chewed until there was nothing left to chew and when at last he was ready to direct conversation away from this balls shrinking topic he cleared his throat. “Now, you know it doesn’t matter. She can’t give you the cut direct without my support. And you know I would never allow you to be tossed out of society.”
“True.” She pouted slightly at being directed away from her favorite subject, bed play, but rallied and picked up a pink iced cake and popped it into her mouth. “But it is the principal of the matter, my dearest. She has no business having such control at all over my affairs.”
“Grandmama is formidable. . . And I need her. I was never supposed to be the duke and she does what Henry was supposed to. . . What I can’t. . .” The words turned to sand in his mouth. It sounded so innocuous and yet he knew the words caused so much pain. He hated himself for letting them out.
Henry.
Perfect, wonderful Henry that everyone had loved, including himself. The eldest had been the kind of young man that everyone adored. Everyone had basked in Henry’s charismatic presence, hoping a little of his joyful persona might rub off on them.
Henry, who if not a favorite, had worshiped the ground their mother walked on. And now he was dead. “Mother, I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t, dear boy.” Even though she spoke with ease, her usual cheer dimmed considerably as her gaze darted to the
window. She sniffed slightly and pressed her emerald ringed hand to her mouth. After twenty years, she still missed Henry, her first born.
And he’d brought that suffering to her.
For an instant, he was a little boy again, stuttering, I…I…D-didn’t mean it, father, over Henry’s forever still, blue body.
“And your other brother,” his mother cut through his thoughts, forcing a smile to her lips. “Charles?”
Jack took his cue readily, wishing to see happiness restored to his mother’s usually mischievous eyes though Charles mightn’t be the surest course to that end. “Don’t you bestow your presence upon him?”
“My presence isn’t terribly welcome in his home,” she drawled.
Charles, perverse fellow that he was, couldn’t seem to stand being around her, having been the one to steal her beloved husband from her. She’d tried on repeated occasions to convince him how blameless he was, but every visit seemed to result in Charles’ achieving drunken stupors which would shame a St. Giles gin sot. “He’ll come around.”
“Of course he will.” She placed her teacup and saucer down with the barest of clunks and allowed herself to lean back against the gold embroidered chair, her skirts, shifting about her like rippled cake icing. “He’s an Eversleigh.”
Jack fiddled with his napkin, folding and unfolding it, wondering how in the hell to ease the discomfort he’d managed to bring to this conversation. As much as he loved to agitate her, he hated to grieve her and because of this he found himself suddenly blurting, “Have you spoken with the Duchess of Darkwell recently?”
Her mother’s brows waggled at the hint of ensuing gossip. “Kathryn?” she trilled, rolling the r as if the woman had been born in Spain and not Shropshire. “No. Why do you ask?”
Jack suddenly felt a school boy, his first day at Eton. He should really just ask Ryder but the idea of revealing his undue curiosity about the young woman who had stormed into his life wasn’t an option he was willing to contemplate.
And though it would delight his mother, asking about the young woman who had turned his life into a violently shaken champagne bottle wasn’t exactly the best laid plan. “She has a young lady staying with her I believe.”
His mother cocked her head to the side, her diamond ear drops bouncing against her cheek. “And you are curious about her?”
“Yes,” he said coolly, a lack of true interest imperative since he did not wish to supply the information that said young woman had followed him into a tavern. “I thought perhaps you could find it in your motherly heart to facilitate an introduction.”
His mother began to chuckle. The chuckle turned into a full laugh until her eyes were watering and she pressed a hand to her lace covered bodice.
Jack sat in squirming silence then finally gritted, “And what is so amusing?”
She attempted to stifle her laughter, her face contorting, as she tried to gain composure, but then she began laughing again until she coughed at the length and force of her guffaws.
Shifting on his seat, Jack waited with a growing sense of foreboding. His mother’s sense of humor was a terribly twisted one. “Elucidate, if you please.”
“The Duchess’s guest is quite a remarkable young lady. You should call upon Darkwell this afternoon. I know for a fact they shall all be in as I was to call upon them myself. The lady has only just arrived from Paris, I believe. Or so the grist mill says.”
Jack sat a little straighter, amazed at the ease all this was going. “Thank you. I think I will.”
“Oh, and do give her husband my regards.”
“Husband?” he echoed as if he did not already know. “You know her husband?”
He had a great deal of experience with married women. Most of London knew he had the ability to ferret out a faithless woman and expose her to the world with more haste that a cat could twitch its whiskers at the sight of a scurrying mouse. Even so, when it came to married ladies, one did have to make sure the husband wasn’t going to come thundering in, pistol waving amidst melodramatic declarations of betrayal. Any information that his mother might impart would be most useful.
“Mmm, quite well.” She glared down at her half empty teacup. “I suppose it’s too early for champagne?”
“Never for you mother.” Jack stood, and crossed to the bell pull by the fire. His mother’s blood ran half French champagne, half ton scandal and who was he to deny her life’s ready pleasures? She’d had enough suffering and sometimes he wished the ton, who sometimes cast a wary eye upon Hyacinth, could remember that.
His mother clasped her hands together upon her lap in anticipation. “As far as I can tell though, the lady deserves far better than her conjugal companion.” Her eyes widened with the delight of truly scandalous tittle. “They have been apart for years.”
Ah. A neglected wife. That explained her reserve and obvious inexperience. “For once mother, you’ve been extremely helpful.”
“Why thank you, Jack,” she said with a large note of graciousness.
And to think he’d been annoyed at his mother’s call.
Chapter 4
Hyde Park
The Duchess of Darkwell’s town house
Four o’clock
Cordelia tugged determinedly at the long sleeves of her sapphire blue, skin covering frock and hoped to goodness it was suitable enough for a visit from her mother-in-law. She wanted to look like a nun. Apparently, in London, if one engaged in unwomanly behavior such as entertaining sheiks, Russian princes who fancied archeology, or French dukes with the ability to persuade idiot Italians not to blast apart the pyramids, one was also likely a harlot. Digging about in the sand, and leading groups of men without assistance also condemned her to the likes of Jezebel dancing gaily with the antichrist as the four horsemen of the apocalypse brought the world to its fiery end. It had been most fascinating to discover just how badly her character had been painted.
Then again, given the duchess’ own reputation, she probably wouldn’t give two thoughts to her character. Still, she was taking no chances in this meeting. The high necked ensemble which only exposed her face, the barest hint of neck, and hands was the closest she could come to the garb of one who had taken the saintly veil.
The rest of her was swathed from head to toe, her frock quite simple, no bows or beads to trick it out, and not a bit of jewelry for adornment (something she’d discovered she quite enjoyed and yet was not quite brave enough to wear in public as of yet). For the last fifteen years, she’d largely dressed in suitably altered garments. After all, the fashion of the day did not a female mountain goat make, and scampering over rocks was most certainly required of her in her daily activities.
Typically, her hair was a riot of curls pulled back in a serviceable twist and so she’d considered not using curling tongs upon her hair, but the maid had shrieked that such an aberration would simply be too much in Town and frankly she was astonished at how much she actually enjoyed the soft tendrils the maid had managed to tame her wild hair into, boring as the process had been. She’d managed to read a newssheet from front to back during the arduous toilette.
If her new look didn’t scream respectability, nothing else could. And despite what London might be whispering, she was determined to pass herself off for exactly what she was, a virgin.
Her gaze skimmed the pink damask furniture, matching woven rug, and the striped silk walls. It was the room of a society woman and a society woman she was not.
A half growl of frustration, half sigh rushed past her lips. Everything was going completely contrary to her intentions. She’d planned to come to London, take part in what pleasure there was to be had given how little time she spent in society, and get the annulment done. She’d had no intention of brushing elbows with the haute ton.
For what was the haute ton but everything she had been taught to generally revile? Her father and mother valued the artists, the scientists, the rabble rousers of this world. They’d been one step away from supporting Napoleon and his Repu
blican ways. After all, it was his journey to Egypt that had exposed the land’s lost treasures. But her parents had been unable to support his arrogance and self-importance which had culminated in the little man declaring himself emperor of the French. Her parents loathed the trappings of aristocracy. It mattered not that they were aristocrats themselves.
In any case, Cordelia had been raised to find lords and ladies unappealing. In fact the only thing that her parents had appreciated about the peerage was their patronage of their expeditions to the Etruscan hills and then the valleys of Egypt. Even so, they felt lords were only tolerable as long as they stayed on their estates shooting as many poor birds as they may, keeping their noses out of the affairs of running the world, silly creatures that they were.
That appreciation of patronage was the only reason she was staying under the Duke of Darkwell’s roof. His wife’s excessively wealthy father had been a patron and upon his death, Kate had kept up the funds. Over the years, she and the now Duchess of Darkwell had shared a correspondence, becoming friends over pages shunted too and fro across the globe.
She was grateful for such friendship now. If one had to stay in London, staying with a Duchess who was also a dear friend was the only way to do it.
Cordelia lifted a hand to her cheeks. Cool. There was no heat in them. Not in this freezing country. Even in summer she was cold. She should be hot. Hot with indignation, and yet her inner fire couldn’t quite make her fingers and face warm.
It was remarkable with what haste gossip spread, or how these pecking hens of society even wheedled the information out of the unwitting to begin with. They were worse then a group of grave robbers spreading word of a newly discovered tomb.
No doubt, one of Duchess Kathryn’s servants had let Cordy’s presence slip to someone else’s servant on their day off and well, it had resulted in Kathryn bustling in this morning with the news that the renowned Duchess of Hunt would be paying call.