Winning the Wallflower

by Eloisa James

  Linnet counted to five and then said, stonily, “It’s the only chest I have, Mrs. Hutchins, and everyone’s gowns are designed like this. There’s nothing special about my neckline.”

  “It makes you look like a light frigate,” she observed.

  “What?”

  “A light frigate. A light woman!”

  “Isn’t a frigate a boat?”

  “Exactly, the type that docks in many harbors.”

  “I do believe that it is the first jest you’ve ever told me,” Linnet said. “And to think I was worried that you might not have a sense of humor.”

  After that, the corners of Mrs. Hutchins’s mouth turned down and she refused to say anything more. And she refused to accompany Linnet back to the drawing room. “I’ve naught to do with what’s come upon you,” she said. “It’s the will of heaven, and you can tell your father I said so. I did my best to instill principles in you, but it was too late.”

  “That seems rather unfair,” Linnet said. “Even a very young light frigate should have the chance to dock at one harbor before she’s scuppered.”

  Mrs. Hutchins gasped. “You dare to jest. You have no idea of propriety—none! I think we all know where to put the blame for that.”

  “Actually, I think I have more understanding of propriety and its opposite than most. After all, Mrs. Hutchins, I, not you, grew up around my mother.”

  “And there’s the root of your problem,” she said, with a grim smile. “It’s not as if her ladyship were a felt-maker’s daughter who ran away with a tinker. No one cares about that sort. Your mother danced like a thief in the mist while everyone was watching her. She was no private strumpet; she let the world see her iniquity!”

  “A thief in the mist,” Linnet repeated. “Is that biblical, Mrs. Hutchins?”

  But Mrs. Hutchins pressed her lips together and left the room.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Castle Owfestry

  Pendine, Wales

  Ancestral Seat of the Dukes of Windebank

  Piers Yelverton, Earl of Marchant, and heir to the Duke of Windebank, was in a considerable amount of pain. He had learned long ago that to think about discomfort—a blasted, silly word for this sort of agony—was to give it a power that he didn’t care to acknowledge. So he pretended not to notice, and leaned a bit more heavily on his cane, relieving the pressure on his right leg.

  The pain made him irritable. But maybe it wasn’t the pain. Maybe it was the fact that he had to stand around wasting his time with a roaring idiot.

  “My son is suffering from acute diarrhea and abdominal pain,” Lord Sandys said, pulling him closer to the bed.

  Sandys’s son was lying in bed looking gaunt and yellow, like tea-stained linen. He looked to be in his thirties, with a long face and an unbearably pious air. Though that might have been due to the prayer book he was clutching.

  “We’re desperate,” Sandys said, looking indeed quite desperate. “I’ve paraded five London physicians past his bed, and bringing him here to Wales is our last resort. So far he’s been bled, treated with leeches, given tinctures of nettles. He drinks nothing but asses’ milk, never cows’ milk. Oh, and we’ve given him several doses of sulfur, but to no effect.”

  That was mildly interesting. “One of those fools you saw must have been Sydenham,” Piers said. “He’s obsessed with sulfur auratum antimonii. Gives it out for stubbed toes. Along with opium, of course.”

  Sandys nodded. “Dr. Sydenham was hopeful that the sulfur would relieve my son’s symptoms, but it didn’t help.”

  “It wouldn’t. The man was enough of a fool to be admitted to the Royal College of Physicians, and that should have told you something.”

  “But you’re—”

  “I joined purely as a kindness to them.” He peered down at Sandys’s son. He was certainly looking the worse for wear. “It likely didn’t make you feel any better to trudge all the way to Wales to see me.”

  The man blinked at him. Then he said, slowly, “We were in a carriage.”

  “Inflamed eyes,” Piers said. “Signs of a recent nosebleed.”

  “What do you gather from that? What does he need?” Sandys asked.

  “Better bathing. Is he always that color?”

  “His skin is a bit yellow,” Sandys acknowledged. “It doesn’t come from my side of the family.” That was an understatement, given that Sandys’s nose was the color of a cherry.

  “Did you eat a surfeit of lampreys?” Piers asked the patient.

  The man looked up at him as if he had sprouted horns. “Larkspy? What’s a larkspy? I haven’t eaten any of it.”

  Piers straightened up. “He doesn’t know the history of England. He’s better off dead.”

  “Did you ask if he’d eaten any lampreys?” Sandys said. “He hates seafood. Can’t abide eels.”

  “More to the point, he’s deaf as a post. The first King Henry ate lampreys, one of the many mad kings we’ve had in this country, though not as cracked as the current one. Still, Henry was thickheaded enough to have eaten a surfeit of eels and died of it.”

  “I am not deaf!” the patient said. “I can hear as well as the next, if people would just stop mumbling at me. My joints hurt. They’re the problem.”

  “You’re dying, that’s the problem,” Piers pointed out.

  Sandys grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. “Don’t say such a thing in front of my son. He’s no more than thirty-two.”

  “He’s got the body of an eighty-year-old. Has he spent much time consorting with actresses?”

  Sandys snorted. “Certainly not! Our family goes back to—”

  “Nightwalkers? Hussies? Mollishers, mopsies, or mackerels? Though mackerels brings fish back into this conversation and you already told me that the man can’t abide seafood. But what about fish of the female variety?”

  “My son is a member of the Church!” Sandys blustered.

  “That settles it,” Piers said. “Everyone lies, but churchmen make an art of it. He’s got syphilis. Churchmen are riddled with it, and the more pious they are, the more symptoms they have. I should have known the moment I saw that prayer book.”

  “Not my son,” Sandys said, sounding as if he actually believed it. “He’s a man of God. Always has been.”

  “As I was saying—”

  “Seriously.”

  “Hmm. Well, if not a mopsy—”

  “No one,” Sandys said, shaking his head. “He’s never—he’s not interested. He’s like a saint, that boy is. When he was sixteen, I took him to Venus’s Rose, in the Whitefriars, but he didn’t take the slightest interest in any of the girls. Just started praying, and asked them to join him, which they didn’t care for. He’s a candidate for sainthood.”

  “His sainthood is about to become a question for a higher authority. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Sandys grabbed his arm. “You must!”

  “I can’t.”

  “But the other doctors, all of them, they gave him medicines, they said—”

  “They were fools, who didn’t tell you the truth.”

  Sandys swallowed. “He was fine until he was twenty. Just a fine, healthy boy, and then—”

  “Take your son home and let him die in peace. Because die he will, whether I give you a solution of sulfur or not.”

  “Why?” Sandys whispered.

  “He has syphilis. He’s deaf, he’s diarrhetic, he’s jaundiced, he’s got eye and joint inflammation and nosebleeds. He likely gets headaches.”

  “He’s never been with a woman. Ever. I swear it. He hasn’t any sores on his private parts or he would have mentioned it.”

  “He didn’t have to be with a woman,” Piers said, nipping his coat out of Sandys’s hand and shaking his sleeve straight again.

  “How can he have syphilis without—”

  “It could have been a man.”

  Sandys looked so shocked that Piers relented. “Or it could have been you, which is far more likely. The rosy ladies you v
isited as a youth infected the boy before he was even born.”

  “I was treated with mercury,” Sandys protested.

  “To no avail. You still have it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have important things to do. Like treat a patient who might live for another year.”

  Piers strolled out, finding his butler Prufrock in the hallway. “I wonder how you ever get anything done,” he said to him. “It must be hard to run a household when you have to conduct all your business in the corridors so you can hear every golden word that falls from my lips.”

  “I do not find it a particular problem,” Prufrock said, falling in beside him. “But then I have lots of practice. You don’t think that you were a trifle hard on Lord Sandys?”

  “Hard? Was I hard? Surely not. I told him exactly what was wrong with his son, and what to do next—in short, go home and wait for choirs of angels, because there are no miracles on this side of the divide.”

  “It’s his son that’s dying. And if I got you right, he gave the poor lad the illness. That’s a blow, that is.”

  “My father wouldn’t have minded a bit,” Piers assured him. “If he had another heir, that is. But Sandys has a whole passel of children. An heir and more to spare.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The Church, you fool. He put this boy into the Church and seems to have trained him up to it from an early age, too. The heir must be rousting about in brothels just like good old Pa. Sandys would never have allowed the spare near a Bible if he were, in fact, the heir. This one is expendable, which is a bloody good thing, under the circumstances.”

  “Your father the duke would be greatly disturbed at the very idea that he’d passed on a disease of this nature,” Prufrock said.

  “Perhaps,” Piers said, pretending to consider it. “And perhaps not. I’m amazed my father hasn’t married a fresh young thing of twenty. Or sixteen. Time’s a-wasting, and at this rate he’ll never have the spare he needs.”

  “His Grace was devoted to Her Grace and wounded by the terrible events of the past,” Prufrock said with a palpable lack of attention to the truth.

  Piers didn’t bother answering that. His leg hurt as if someone had stuck a hot poker into his thigh. “I need a drink, so why don’t you rush ahead like a good butler and meet me at the door of the library with a strong brandy?”

  “I’ll keep walking next to you in case you keel over,” Prufrock said.

  “I suppose you have visions of breaking my fall,” Piers said, giving his scrawny butler a sidelong glance.

  “Actually, no. But I would call for a footman, who could drag you along the corridor. It’s marble, so you might get a concussion, and that might make you a bit kinder to your patients, not to mention your staff. You had Betsy in tears again this morning. You seem to think scullery maids grow on trees.”

  Thank God, they were getting close to the library. Piers paused for a moment, the idea of amputation flitting through his mind, and not for the first time. He could get one of those Egyptian bed-things that Cleopatra had herself carried about on. Walking would be a damned sight more difficult, but at least he’d be free of this infernal pain.

  “Your father has written,” Prufrock told him. “I took the liberty of putting the letter on your desk.”

  “Took the liberty of steaming it open, more like,” Piers said. “What does he have to say?”

  “He expresses some interest in your marital future,” Prufrock said cheerfully. “It seems that last missive you sent him, the one listing all your demands for a spouse, did not dissuade him. Rather surprising, I must say.”

  “The one that called him an idiot?” Piers asked. “Did you read that one too, you pestilent polecat?”

  “You’re quite poetical today,” Prufrock observed. “All that alliteration in the service of mopsies and mollishers, and now for your lowly butler. I’m honored, I assure you.”

  “What’s the duke writing about now?” Piers said. He could see the library door. He could almost feel the brandy going down his throat. “I told him that I wouldn’t accept a wife unless she was as beautiful as the sun and the moon. Which is a quote from literature, in case you don’t know. And I added quite a lot of other provisions as well, ones guaranteed to send him into a frothing fit of despair.”

  “He’s looking for a wife,” Prufrock said.

  “For himself, I would hope. Although he’s waited a bit long,” Piers said, failing to summon any particular interest in this news. “Men of his age don’t have the balls they once had, if you’ll excuse the vulgar truth of it, Prufrock. Lord knows you have more delicate sensibilities than I do.”

  “I used to, before I began working for you,” Prufrock said, pushing open the library door with a flourish.

  Piers had one thing in mind. It was golden, tasted like fire, and would cut the pain in his leg.

  “So he’s looking for a wife,” he repeated without paying any attention to the words, but heading straight for the brandy decanter. He poured out a hefty dose. “It’s been a rotten day. Not that it matters to me, or you, for that matter, but there’s nothing I can do for that young woman who showed up at the back door this morning.”

  “The one who’s all swollen in the belly?”

  “It’s not the usual swelling, and if I cut her open, I’ll kill her. If I don’t cut her open, the disease will kill her. So I took the easier of the two options.” He threw back the brandy.

  “You sent her away?”

  “She had nowhere to go. I turned her over to Nurse Matilda, with instructions to bed her down in the west wing with enough opium to keep her mind off what’s happening next. Thank God this castle is big enough to house half the dying people in England.”

  “Your father,” Prufrock said, “and the question of marriage.”

  He was trying to distract him. Piers poured another glass, smaller this time. He had no wish to stick his head in a bottle of brandy and never come out again, if only because he’d learned from his patients that overindulgence meant that brandy wouldn’t blunt the pain anymore. “Ah, marriage,” he said obediently. “About time. My mother’s been gone these twenty years. Well, gone isn’t quite the word, is it? At any rate, darling Maman is over on the Continent living the good life, so His Grace might as well remarry. It wasn’t easy to get that divorce, you know. Probably cost him as much as a small estate. He should make hay while the sun shines, or in short, while he’s still able to get a rise every other day.”

  “Your father’s not getting married,” Prufrock said. Something in his tone made Piers glance up.

  “You weren’t joking.”

  The butler nodded. “It is my impression that His Grace sees you—or your marriage—as a challenge. It could be that you shouldn’t have listed quite so many requirements. One might say that it fired up the duke’s resolve. Got him interested in the project, so to speak.”

  “The devil you say. He’ll never manage to find anyone. I have a reputation, you know.”

  “Your title is weightier than your reputation,” Prufrock said. “Additionally, there is the small matter of your father’s estate.”

  “You’re probably right, damn you.” Piers decided he could manage another small glass. “But what about my injury, hmm? You think a woman would agree to marry a man—what am I saying? Of course a woman would agree to that.”

  “I doubt many young ladies would see that as an insurmountable problem,” Prufrock said. “Now, your personality . . .”

  “Damn you,” Piers said, but without heat.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The moment Linnet returned to the drawing room, her father groaned aloud. “I turned down three marriage proposals for you last month, and I can tell you right now that I’ll never receive another one. Hell, I wouldn’t believe you a maiden myself. You look four or five months along.”

  Linnet sat down rather heavily, her skirts floating up like a white cloud and then settling around her. “I’m not,” she said. “I am not pregnant.” She was sta
rting to feel almost as if she truly were carrying a child.

  “Ladies don’t use that word,” Lord Sundon said. “Didn’t you learn anything from that governess of yours?” He waved his quizzing glass in the air the better to illustrate his point. “One might refer to a delicate condition, or perhaps to being enceinte. Never to pregnancy, a harsh word with harsh connotations. The pleasure, the joy of being of our rank, is that we may overlook the earthy, the fertile, the . . .”

  Linnet stopped listening. Her father was a vision in pale blue, his waistcoat fastened with silver buttons inset with ivory poppies, his Prussian collar a miracle of elegance. He was very good at overlooking anything earthy, but she’d never been as successful.

  At that moment a long banging sounded at the door. Despite herself, Linnet looked up hopefully when their butler entered to announce the visitor. Surely Prince Augustus had rethought. How could he sit in his castle, knowing that she was being rejected by the ton? He must have heard about the disastrous events of the ball, the way no one had spoken to her after he left.

  Of course, the prince had taken himself away while the news was still spreading through the ballroom. He had walked out the door with his cronies without a backward glance at her . . . and after that every face in the ballroom turned away from her. Apparently they were only waiting to see what his reaction was to being told she was carrying a child.

  Yet he, if anyone, knew it to be a taradiddle. At least, he knew the child wasn’t his. Maybe that was why he threw her over so abruptly. Perhaps he too believed the stories and thought she was pregnant by another man.

  The cut direct from an entire ballroom. It had to be a first.

  The caller wasn’t Prince Augustus, but Linnet’s aunt, Lady Etheridge, known to her intimates as Zenobia. She had chosen that name for herself, realizing as a young girl that Hortense didn’t suit her personality.