Christmas with the Duchess (21 page)

“No, indeed,” Palafox answered warmly.

Emma paused in the doorway to deliver one last blow to her one-time lover. “My lord? If you’re going to eavesdrop while Charles and I make love, I recommend you press a glass to the door. I’m not sure how it works, but I’m told it amplifies the sound beautifully.”

Palafox chuckled. “Unless the poor sap is completely deaf, he will have no difficulty hearing your sweet cries of ecstasy,” he said, pulling her back into his room, and closed the door in Nicholas’s face.

Alone with Palafox, Emma snatched up her clothes and ran into the dressing closet.

“Does this mean we’re
not
going to be making love?” Palafox pouted in the bedroom.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Charles,” she shouted through the door.

Nicholas went back to his room to lick his wounds. He thought guiltily of Octavia. No doubt she was still waiting for her lobster patties. He should return to her, he knew. But the last thing he wanted at the moment was to be among other people. In the state he was in, he was either going to break his hand punching a wall or burst into tears like a bereft child. Either way, he could only disgrace himself. He needed time alone to cleanse himself of all thoughts of the cruel and faithless Emma.

In the darkness, he threw himself down on the bed, striking it with his fists.

“Ouch!” howled Julia Fitzroy. At Colin’s insistence, she had been waiting in his bed, stark naked for nearly a quarter of an hour, and this was not quite the greeting she had expected.

Nicholas scrambled to his feet. With shaking hands, he lit a candle. “Julia!” he gasped, as his fifteen-year-old cousin sat up in his bed, the coverlet slipping from her small, firm breasts, and her rich red hair cascading about her shoulders. “What are you doing?”

Barely holding a sheet around her body, Julia walked to the end of the bed on her knees. “Isn’t it obvious?” she pouted. “I’m saving you from Octavia. You can’t marry
her.
She’s too, too awful! Tell the truth,” she went on coquettishly. “Wouldn’t you rather marry
me?
” She looked up at him with wide, dark eyes.

Nicholas scowled at her. “Dress yourself, child,” he said harshly. “I will wait for you outside.”

He strode to the door and opened it. Lady Anne Fitzroy stood there, poised to knock. “Nicholas!” she cried. “Have you seen Julia?”

“I’m here, Mama!” Julia cried cheerfully.

“How do I look?” Emma asked, coming out of Charles’s dressing room with her clothes back on.

“Like you’ve had a good rogering,” he said approvingly. “May at least I escort you back to the ballroom?”

Emma took his arm. “You may.”

They went out into the hall together just in time to see Julia Fitzroy come dancing out of Nicholas’s bedroom wearing nothing but a bed sheet. “
She
looks like she’s had a good rogering, too,” Palafox remarked, sounding a little envious.

Emma could only stare.

“Oh, hullo, Duchess, Mr. Palafox!” Julia called to them. “Would you happen to have a little hartshorn or lavender water? Mama found me naked in bed with Cousin Nicholas, and I’m afraid she’s fainted dead away.”

“I say!” Palafox murmured.

Emma stalked into Nicholas’s room. Lady Anne had collapsed into her nephew’s arms. Nicholas had lowered her to the rug and was fanning her ineffectively with his hands.

Nicholas looked up at her, panic in his eyes. “She just sort of fell over,” he said weakly.

“I’m not a bit surprised,” Emma said dryly. Sinking down to the floor, she began chafing Lady Anne’s wrists together.

Julia appeared over Emma’s shoulder with smelling salts. Her loose hair brushed against Emma’s cheek. “Charles had these in his room.”

“Dress yourself, child,” Emma told her in an awful voice. “Let not your shame be the first thing your poor mother sees when she returns to us.”

“Yes, your grace,” Julia said, scampering off to Nicholas’s closet.

“I can assure you, madam, this is not what it looks like!” Nicholas protested as Emma opened the bottle.

“Really?” Emma said coldly. “Because it looks a bit like the pot has called the kettle black.”

“No!” he cried. “I just came back to my room, and there she was. Nothing happened. I never touched her. You do believe me, don’t you? Emma?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” said Emma, helping Lady Anne sit up. Lady Anne gasped for breath, but she was conscious.

“Aunt Anne? You believe me, don’t you?” Nicholas said anxiously. “Julia just appeared in my room. I—I did not invite her here.”

“Come now, my lord,” Palafox said coldly. “It’s damned obvious what you’ve been up to with your pretty little cousin! And if you were any sort of a gentleman, you would make that poor child an offer of marriage. After all, if you do not marry her, she’s ruined.”

“Ruined!” Lady Anne sobbed. “My youngest child!”

“What do you mean, ruined?” cried Nicholas. “I never touched her!”

“Julia is not a widow with a certain reputation,” Emma told Nicholas coolly. “In other words, she ain’t me! She will be ruined unless you marry her.”

“Can we not…Can we not keep it quiet?” Nicholas pleaded with them.

“
I’m
not keeping it quiet,” said Palafox. “Are you, Duchess?”

“I shall be silent as the grave,” said Emma. “But will Julia? Will her mother?”

“My youngest daughter is ruined,” Lady Anne wailed. “Nicholas must marry her. There’s nothing else to be done.”

“But—but I am promised to marry Octavia,” Nicholas protested weakly.

“Oh, my God!” Lady Anne gasped. “Who is going to tell Octavia?”

She fainted dead away, collapsing into Emma’s arm.

“I’ll tell her,” said Julia, shrugging.

December 1815

Julia, Lady Camford, pushed her head out of the window of her husband’s carriage as it rumbled up the avenue to Warwick Palace. Dark clouds filled the wintry sky, casting a heavy, gray-violet pall over the great house, which looked forbidding and deserted in its brilliant emerald-green setting. A light, cold drizzle had been falling, but, as the carriage drew near the front steps, thunder broke overhead, and the heavens opened up, sending rain down in hard sheets. Quickly, Julia pulled her head in, losing a feather from her wide-brimmed bonnet in the process. “It’s too bad!” she complained to her husband, who was seated opposite her in the carriage.

Nicholas was no longer the cheerful, good-natured young man he had been the year before. He looked older now, closer to thirty than twenty, and, though he was still handsome, there were grim lines around his mouth, and a hard, cynical glint in his blue eyes. His hair was finely barbered, and, after a year in the wan English sun, it had darkened from blond almost to chestnut brown. He sat reading a book, paying no attention whatsoever to his sixteen-year-old wife.

Julia tried again. “Nicky! I said it’s too bad.”

She knew perfectly well that her husband loathed being called Nicky, at least by her, but it usually elicited some response from him. This time, however, the Earl of Camford merely turned the page of his book, a very dry, dull treatise on estate management.

Julia sighed, exasperated by her husband’s indifference. Julia was the most interesting person that Julia had ever known. Why anyone would willingly deny himself her companionship was completely beyond her power to comprehend. “Nicky, are you listening to me?” she demanded. “Cousin Harry is not yet arrived.”

Nicholas glanced at her, frowning. He had been married to Julia nearly a year, and, for nearly a year, he had been frowning at her, unwilling to forgive her for tricking him into marriage. At first, Julia had tried to make him love her, but her efforts had only served to make him resent her all the more. Nor could he be seduced, she had discovered. He had never visited her bed, and she knew by now that he had no intention of ever doing so. One night, he had told her frankly that he would sooner mate with a cat.

After that, Julia had stopped trying to make him love her. Instead, she had begun to hate him, and the triumph of having made herself Countess of Camford turned to ashes in her mouth.

“How could you possibly know the duke is not at home?” Nicholas asked her sharply. “We have not yet arrived ourselves.”

“If he were here, the ducal standard would be flying from the ramparts,” she explained.

Nicholas stuck his finger in his book. “You told me his grace invited us,” he said. “I don’t like showing up at a house when the owner is not home.”

“His grace
did
invite us,” said Julia. “That is to say, I wrote to him, and asked him to invite us, which amounts to the same thing.”

“You did what?” Nicholas said angrily.

“Harry wouldn’t say no to me,” she said smugly. “I’m his favorite cousin.”

“He might say no to you, out of deference to his mother. Her grace, certainly, will not want to see us. You assured me—”

Julia waved a careless hand encased in fine yellow kid leather. “Oh, the duchess won’t care,” she scoffed. “She sees her old lovers everywhere she goes, without any awkwardness at all. Indeed, from what I hear, she’s quite friendly with her former flames. Why should
you
be any different?”

Her wide, dark eyes looked at him very frankly. She knew perfectly well that Emma had been Nicholas’s first and only lover, and that any mention of the woman still caused him pain.

Nicholas was sorry he had brought up the subject of Emma. He had not seen her since January 6, 1815, Twelfth Night. She had left Warwick before first light on the following day. After returning her sons to Harrow, she had gone to Paris, taking the child, Aleta, with her.

Nicholas, meanwhile, had been obliged to go to London, to make his presentation at Court, to formally take his seat in the House of Lords, and, of course, to marry Julia. But hardly a day passed that he was not reminded of Emma. His brief affair with her at Warwick had become public knowledge, and he was taxed with it on every possible occasion. All of London gossiped of wicked Emma and her escapades in Paris, real or imagined, and all of London felt obliged to keep Lord Camford abreast of her affair with Chateaubriand, the great man of letters, or her intrigue with the Duc de Bourbon. Every report stung Nicholas like a fresh betrayal.

Then, as February gave way to March, the situation in Europe changed. Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba at the end of February 1815, landing on the French coast on March 1. Within three weeks, he had seized control of France from the weak Bourbon king, who fled with his court to Belgium. Abandoned by her French friends, Emma had been trapped in Paris. The Congress of Vienna had lost no time declaring war on France, making Emma’s position even more precarious.

For several weeks, there was no word of Emma’s situation, and speculating about the fate of the unfortunate Duchess of Warwick briefly became a favorite pastime in London society. The duchess had been thrown to an angry mob, and subjected to every form of degradation before being ripped to pieces. Or she had been tried as a spy, found guilty, and sent to the guillotine. Or she had been thrown into the Bastille—a structure that had been torn down before the turn of the century, but why bother with facts?

The truth, when it came out, was rather less sinister. In the early days of his return, Napoleon had hoped to treat with Great Britain in a separate peace. According to the newspapers, the Duchess of Warwick had been offered parole, on the condition that she carry back to England a letter for the Prince Regent from Napoleon himself. Emma had politely declined, reportedly saying that she was neither a messenger nor an agent of France. Irate, Napoleon had placed her under house arrest.

Even if, as Lady Jersey slyly observed, it was the first time the Duchess of Warwick ever said no to a man, that simple refusal was enough to restore Emma to the good graces of society. In absentia, she became the toast of London.

While the rest of London celebrated Emma’s small act of defiance, Nicholas had a very different reaction. He had wanted to strangle Emma for her recklessness. She should have had more sense than to antagonize the most powerful man in France. She should have taken the tyrant’s letter and returned to the safety of England. That spring, as war gathered like an inevitable storm on the horizon, Nicholas had nearly driven himself mad with worry over Emma.

But by June of that year, Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo, and by July, Louis XVIII once again sat on the throne of France. Emma came through her ordeal not only unscathed, but more popular in her own country than she had been before. Her vouchers to Almack’s were restored; the old Queen welcomed the duchess at the royal levees; and the Prince Regent gave a dinner in her honor at Carlton House, where he presented her with a little gold medal.

To avoid seeing her, Nicholas had retreated to the countryside, to Camford, returning to London only when he was certain she had gone away again.

“Nicky? Did you hear me?” Julia’s voice pierced the air. “I said—”

“I heard you, madam,” he said sharply. “You forget, Julia, that our marriage was a scandal. We cannot assume that we are welcome everywhere.”

“Silly!” said Julia. “We got married to
avoid
the scandal, remember?”

“I do not like going to a house when the owner is away from it,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Nonsense, my love. We arrived at Warwick last year when the duke was not at home.”

The endearment made Nicholas shudder. “That was your father’s doing,” he said darkly. “I shall never forget my embarrassment when I met the duke for the first time, and he said, ‘Who the devil are you?’ Not in so many words,” he amended. “But that was his grace’s meaning.”

Julia shrugged. “Papa didn’t want you going to London to meet with the attorney,” she said simply. “The attorney would have told you about Cousin Catherine.”

Before meeting with the attorney in London, Nicholas had had no idea of Lady Catherine St. Austell’s existence. She was his cousin, the daughter and only child of the last Earl of Camford, from whom Nicholas had inherited the title. Hugh Fitzroy had been her legal guardian, as he had been Nicholas’s before Nicholas came of age.

Fearful that Nicholas would marry this other cousin, rather than one of their daughters, the Fitzroys had kept Lady Catherine a secret until after Nicholas was safely engaged to Julia.

Julia, too, had kept the secret; it was another thing for which Nicholas could not forgive her. Not that she seemed to require forgiveness. She certainly felt no remorse.

“We simply couldn’t let you find out about Catherine,” she explained. “You
had
to marry one of
us.
It was the only way.”

“It was the only way to keep your father out of prison,” Nicholas agreed coldly. “Yes, madam, I do understand. He’d been stealing from the Camford estate for years.”

Julia sighed impatiently. “I wish you would not glare at
me,
” she complained. “What did
I
do? If you keep blaming me for all the dreadful things my father has done, we will never get on. We will never be husband and wife.”

“You were complicit,” he told her stubbornly. “You could have told me that the last Earl of Camford had left behind a daughter.”

“But then you might have married
her
instead of me,” said Julia, a puzzled frown on her pretty face. “I would not be Countess of Camford.”

“That is a distinct possibility.”

“Well, then!” she said, laughing. “Only an idiot would have told you. Besides, Catherine seems very happy married to her young man.”

“That is the silver lining,” Nicholas agreed. In April, when Nicholas had come of age, he had replaced Julia’s father as Catherine’s guardian. At that time, he had provided Catherine with a generous dowry, making it possible for her to marry the young man of her choice. Lord Hugh Fitzroy previously had refused to allow the match because the young man was only a poor curate.

“Mama and Papa forbade us to tell you about Catherine,” Julia went on. “I was only trying to be an obedient daughter. I didn’t even
know
Papa was stealing from the estate. He always said it was borrowing. It was very wrong of him to steal, of course, when he should only have borrowed, and I think you were right to turf him out of the house when you came of age. But am I to be punished forever for the sins of my father?”

The day he had sent his in-laws packing had been one of the most satisfying of Nicholas’s life, but even the memory of that happy occasion was not enough to bring a smile to his face as he looked at his wife. After all, he had not been able to send
her
packing. “You are not blameless. It was not your
father
who climbed naked into my bed,” he reminded her.

Julia giggled provocatively. “Lucky for you!”

Nicholas shook his head in disgust.

Julia scowled, hating him for his complete immunity to her charms. “I wonder what my mother will say when I tell her you have not yet consummated our marriage,” she said threateningly.

“I neither know nor care,” Nicholas said as the carriage rolled to a stop.

“But aren’t you afraid of looking ridiculous? Everyone will think you are impotent!” she protested, quite bewildered by his nonchalance.

“When it comes to you, madam, I am,” he answered rudely.

Servants dressed in black livery trotted out to meet the carriage, and huge black wreaths hung on the double doors of the great house. At the sight, Nicholas was forcibly reminded that Lord Michael Fitzroy had died less than six months before, fully ten days after the Battle of Waterloo, from wounds he had sustained in the action. Warwick was in the depths of mourning.

Nicholas suddenly felt ashamed of himself. Despite Lord Hugh’s pilfering, Camford was still a rich estate, throwing off a staggering income of ten thousand a year. And, as unappealing as he found the idea of making love to his sixteen-year-old cousin, Nicholas knew that few men in his place would be so particular. Sometimes he envied those other men for their ability to use women without regret or remorse.

The footmen were already removing Julia’s trunk from the boot. There could be no turning back from Warwick now. Barring some calamity, Nicholas and Julia would be obliged to stay until Twelfth Night. Darting through the icy rain, Julia hurried into the house, lifting her skirts to show off expensive stockings of purple silk. The more soberly dressed Nicholas followed her slowly. He did not mind the cold rain. It reminded him of his days at sea when exposure to the elements was an everyday occurrence.

“Where is everyone?” Julia called to the butler.

Carstairs, looking about a hundred years old in a suit of funereal black, was moving slowing across the Great Hall to them. Gone were the garlands and wreaths of balsam fir that had filled the room with their scent the year before. In their place were drapes of black bunting.

“I have the distinct impression that you were not expecting us, Carstairs,” Nicholas said, when the butler had greeted them. He glared at Julia, who merely tossed her head.

Carstairs looked frailer than he had the year before. “Lady Anne did give us to understand that your lordship and your ladyship would be spending Christmas at Camford,” he apologized. “I shall have a suite readied for you at once, my lord, if you would be good enough to wait.”

“I am sorry for the misunderstanding,” said Nicholas. “If it’s not too much trouble, Lady Camford and I would prefer separate rooms.”

Julia shot him a hurt, angry look.

“Very good, my lord,” Carstairs replied without a change of expression. “We have several rooms at the ready now. I had assumed your lordship required an apartment. If you will follow me…”