An Affair Before Christmas (11 page)

“I don’t think we should start a second game until Villiers is capable once again.”

“Why not? Simply because the first two games played in tandem doesn’t mean that the others have to. It was proximity that lent itself to the distasteful supposition that you were choosing between myself and Villiers.”

She glanced at him, but he was studying the black queen. His eyelashes cast a shadow on his cheek. “You challenged me to a match only on hearing of my match with Villiers,” she said. “That parallel was in your mind, and thereafter in the minds of Londoners.”

“If we play our game now, while Villiers is incapacitated, it will quell the feverish interest in the next occupant of your bed.”

It must be the politician in him; he was utterly dispassionate in discussing his wife’s bed. Of course, his reputation was all important. “Is there a chance that Villiers will not survive?” she asked, fiddling with a bishop.

“The fever has a grip on him. I would think him a lucky man if he lives.”

Jemma felt sick at the thought. “Oh God…” she whispered.

He still didn’t look at her. “Will it break your heart, Jemma? Because if so, I’m truly sorry for it.”

“Break my heart? No. I haven’t known him long. We were getting to be friends, though, and I enjoyed that. I am so sad to hear that he is dying.”

“Perhaps more than friends,” he said. His voice was wooden.

“My heart is a singularly strong instrument,” she said, resenting the conversation, resenting the way he was prying into her feelings. “You broke it long ago, Elijah, and I’ve never given it away since.”

He looked up. “I?”

“Did you not think so?”

“No. You—we shared little, I thought.”

“That’s the worst of it, perhaps,” she said sadly. “We shared little and yet I built a castle out of it. I suppose the word
marriage
has that nonsensical effect on women sometimes. But it was a salutary lesson.”

“I apologize.”

Jemma studied her husband from under her eyelashes. He didn’t have that whip-thin exhausted look to night, the one where his eyes turned shadowed and his cheekbones stood out. He looked a bit tired, but not sick to the bone. “What’s happening in the House of Lords these days?” she ventured.

“Scots and brandy.”

“Scots? Oh, because of the Scottish representation in Lords?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been reading about that tangle? I thought you weren’t interested in politics.”

“I am as interested as any sensible person,” Jemma said, startled. “I haven’t a great deal of time to study all the newspapers, but I do my best.” She couldn’t stop herself. “Though I’m sure I have less understanding than your Miss Tatlock.”

“She is an extraordinary woman,” Elijah said, with a hint of pride in his voice. “For someone of her sex and age, she really has an intuitive understanding of politics. She made a suggestion at the Royal Society today that made Lord Rollins take notice.”

“Oh?” Jemma decided she quite disliked Miss Tatlock. “How did that come about?”

“I gave a lecture there today,” Beaumont said. “That’s why I’m not in parliament. Miss Tatlock runs the Ladies’ Membership. Most lectures are reserved for regular members, but the ladies are invited to join us on occasion.”

Jemma thought about whether she was supposed to know about her husband’s lecture and decided not, since no one had bothered to tell her. “How enterprising of her to attend your lecture. Dare I wonder whether she had a hand in your invitation?”

He looked at her. “Enterprising?”

“Is it too harsh a word? The two of you were linked again in last week’s
Morning Post,
you know. Apparently you drew eyes by having an intimate conversation at Lord Rochester’s
musicale.
I wonder what she thinks will happen to me if she manages to impress you with her manifold virtues?”

He surprised her by not pretending to obtuseness. “Perhaps she thinks you might be fading due to a wasting illness. I notice that young women in the grip of love have no difficulty thinking that miracles will happen.”

“I feel perfectly healthy,” she said lightly. “Shall we play chess?”

“If you would prefer not to resume our match,” Elijah suggested, “perhaps we might play a game on the side.”

Neither one of them said the obvious: if Villiers could not play out his match, the appetite for their parallel match would die with him.

“A sound idea. We’ll play a game or two for the plea sure of it, and wait for Leopold to improve.”

“Leopold?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Villiers’s given name…surely you knew it?” Jemma asked, her face carefully innocent. “I thought you two were the best of boyhood friends.”

“I had not realized that you were quite as intimate as that.”

Jemma moved a pawn forward, the lovely rhythm of pawn to king, queen and castle swelling into her heart and soul and stealing away all those elusive worries about Beaumont’s health and Miss Tatlock, and Villiers’s fever.

An hour later she grinned at her husband. “Now I feel better,” she observed.

“I don’t,” he said sourly.

“You won our first game,” Jemma said, “the one that counted. This is a game which naught sees but us, and yet I am very pleased to have won.”

“Let’s begin our second game in the match,” Elijah said. “Please. I don’t want to wait for Villiers to die. It’s too ghoulish.”

She nodded, set up the board quickly, and moved a pawn to Queen’s Four.

He moved his pawn to the same position and that was that. For today.

He uncoiled himself from the chair, and stood up, all six feet plus of him. Jemma stayed where she was. Her husband was a tremendously handsome man. It was no wonder, really, that he cut such a wide swath through the Parliament.

“I came here to ask you a question, Jemma.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“You returned from France so that we can create an heir. I wondered if you had any schedule in mind for that?”

In other words, when would they go to bed together? Despite herself, Jemma felt a little prickle of interest.

But he kept talking. “I ask because if Villiers were to win his match, Jemma, I think it should alter our plans.”

She stiffened. “You assume that I am the prize for the match, and I assure you that I do not wager myself nor my body on the chessboard.”

She couldn’t read his eyes at all, and cursed silently at his politician’s face.

“Our problem is not whether or with whom you share your favors,” he said evenly, “but the fact that should Villiers win this chess game, all of London will
think
you are bedding him. Whether you do so or not is irrelevant.”

“I hardly think it’s irrelevant,” she answered, stung. “You’re suggesting that your heir might end up being of Villiers’s blood.”

“You misunderstand me,” he said, patient as always. “I am well aware that you are not the sort to accidentally grow large with child.”

It was a notable insult, delivered with all the calm precision of an arrow to the heart. And yet Jemma always found herself warring between truth and logic. The truth was that she had been unfaithful to him while living in Paris. And of course she had no children of those unions. The fact that he had been blatantly unfaithful to her—and presumably was to this day, with one mistress or another—didn’t carry the same weight.

“If you and I were to conceive a child during this period of intense interest in Villiers,” he continued, “I fear that most people would consider that child a cuckoo. At the very least, they would show an unbecoming interest in the child’s heritage that could damage his or her future happiness.”

She nodded. “I can see that.”

“I thought of asking you to give up the match, but I have made a practice of never asking politicians for the one thing I know they will not give, and I am holding to that policy in the home.”

“If you are feeling unwell,” she said, “I will resign from the match. Have you fainted again, Beaumont?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“In that case, I believe you are right and it would be best to wait until the match is over before we engage in…intimacies.”

He bowed. “In that case—”

“That does not mean,” Jemma said, looking at the chessboard, “that you are free to engage in a flirtation with the estimable Miss Tatlock. I am not like to die of a wasting disease; I feel entirely healthy.”

“I am enchanted to hear it.”

“Somehow I feel that the young woman will not share your plea sure.”

His chuckle was rare and all the more welcome for that. “The Duchess of Beaumont jealous! I never thought to see the day. I must say that this makes me feel even kinder toward Miss Tatlock.”

She rose to her feet. “I’ve never been any good at sharing, Elijah. Surely you noticed that from our early marriage?”

He opened his mouth, but she didn’t want his politician’s words, his apologies. She gave him the smoky kind of look one gave a lover, reached up and pulled his head toward hers.

He tasted wonderful, like blackberries and spice. She meant to kiss him as a warning, as a promise, as a way to control him. But the moment after her hand curled around his neck, and their kiss deepened, she remembered the one important fact she’d managed to forget while living in Paris: Elijah’s kisses weren’t like other men’s. They did something to her. Melted her defenses, remade her into a foolish, vulnerable girl who cried for months after they separated.

She jumped back so quickly that she almost knocked over the chess table, then made sure her face reflected nothing of the utter panic she felt.

“A warning?” he asked, eyebrow quizzical, eyes dark.

He always knew…he always knew what she was thinking. For a moment the pain revisited her like a slim shaft to the heart. Then she smiled. “Precisely, Elijah. Precisely.”

“You simply must stay away from him, away, away, away from him!” May screeched many a time. And Charlotte had agreed, of course. May’s ponderous fiancé, Mr. Muddle, had even taken it upon himself to inform Charlotte that a woman’s reputation was her most golden possession. Charlotte had swallowed an angry retort and nodded soberly.

No one seemed to believe that the Duke of Beaumont had, in fact, made no moves to tarnish her reputation in the slightest.

All in all, she thought she behaved admirably—except when she actually ended up in the same room with the Duke of Beaumont, of course. As soon as she saw his face, her heart would start to pound. And then she couldn’t help it; she would tell him what she thought of the
Gazette
’s report of his last speech in Parliament. He would bend his head just so, a bit to the side, and listen so gravely. And he heard her! He really heard her. They…

They…

They talked far too much, and she knew it.

And she knew, even if no one else did, that the duke didn’t have the faintest interest in her as a woman. He never looked at her that way. Charlotte had never been one to fool herself. Her nose was too long and her fortune was too small to allow her to indulge in fantasies of her own beauty. Or her desirability, financial or otherwise.

“Don’t you see,” she finally snapped at May, “what you’re implying is horribly painful to me. You’re implying that the duke would actually like to—to kiss me. And we both know that dukes simply don’t kiss women who look like me. Not single women, not women with disagreeably small fortunes. Dukes
never
kiss spinsters!”

“You’re not that,” May had said.

“I am. You know I am. I’m an old maid,” Charlotte said, hating the world. “I’m an ape-leader. And a tabby, and all those other horrible words. The truth is that no one wanted me, May, and when you make play as if a duke would actually desire me, you just rub salt into the wound!” Her voice rose in a way that had a dangerous little wobble to it.

May was never one for physical demonstrations of affection, but she gave her sister a prompt hug and said that if
she
were a duke, she couldn’t think of a better thing to do than kiss Miss Charlotte Tatlock.

Charlotte smiled a bit mistily and said, “And May, if you happened to have one of the most beautiful women in the
ton
waiting for you at home…to wit, Jemma, the Duchess of Beaumont, would you still want to kiss an old maid named Charlotte Tatlock?”

“Of course!” May said stoutly, but Charlotte knew her point had gone home.

The duchess, after all, was exquisite from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. Charlotte had actually amused herself one day trying to ascertain the color of the duchess’s hair. She decided it was like an egg yolk. That didn’t sound very complimentary, but Charlotte meant one of the eggs that are delivered straight from the country. And when they crack open in your egg cup, the yolk is a deep rich gold, a kind of burnished brandy color, and yet there’s the shine of good health, a sort of deep, natural beauty that was a year and a day from Charlotte’s drab locks.

Put the duchess’s hair together with a lush figure and the unmistakable intelligence in her face—“She is,” Charlotte reminded her sister, “the best chess player in all France, or that’s what they say”—and her argument was finished.

The husband of such a paragon…and Miss Charlotte Tatlock? Never.