Desperate Duchesses (19 page)

“
Oui,
those. The requests come from various newspapers, and also from a club cal ed White’s. They propose to pay Fowle a sum of the money if he wil inform them every day of the position of the games with His Grace and the Duke of Vil iers.”

Jemma slid down in the water. “I see.”

“Of course, Fowle cannot do so without my assistance,” Brigitte said. “And frankly, I told him that the thing cannot be done without your permission. The duchess plays many games of chess at the same time, al in the head, I told him. Bah! He does not understand chess, that one.”

Jemma thought about it. There was only one reason to keep the information to herself that she could think of: the scandal of it. Elijah would loathe having the matches tracked in the press, or bets placed on his victory at White’s.

“I’m afraid the answer is no,” Jemma said. “I’m sorry, Brigitte. I know that the newspapers would have paid wel for the information.”

Brigitte shrugged philosophical y. “Fowle would likely have feathered his nest with most of it. Besides, I have Joseph to keep my feathers warm.” And she laughed as only a Frenchwoman can.

Day two of the Villiers/Beaumont chess matches

Beaumont House

E
lijah woke the next morning as the very first light came through his windows and almost groaned aloud as the details of the day before him burst into his head. Actual y, they had been in his head al night long, because now he realized that he had been in the middle of a terrible dream in which the inner circle of Pitt’s advisors had been invited to breakfast. He had found the room, but left to use the privy. And then wandered for hours through labyrinthine passageways under Lords trying to find his way back to breakfast. At one point he was in a room lined entirely with costumes, and a smirking Lord Corbin told him that a man of wit would always triumph over a laborer. Which, Elijah realized belatedly, referred to himself.

The day was when he would bound out of bed, eager to get to the House of Lords and tackle the enormous complexities of moving large groups of men to do exactly what he wished them to. These days he felt as if he staggered to the carriage.

His fainting episode last autumn didn’t help.

He tried not to think about it too much; what man wants to contemplate his own mortality? But imperceptibly it crept into his thoughts and dreams so that it poisoned his every moment. The morning it happened he hadn’t slept more than a few hours for two days. He was running on energy and wil power, laying the groundwork for Pitt’s takeover of Parliament.

And now Pitt was almost there. He was a good, solid man. Fox would have to retreat to his country house, St. Anne’s Hil , and live with that courtesan he took with him everywhere. Pitt would usher in a new era without corruption, without scandal…

Except for the scandals attached to Jemma, of course.

He ended up sitting on the edge of his bed, head in his hands. The truth of it was that he wasn’t the Prime Minister and never would be. He was an attendant lord. A necessary one. An impassioned man at his best—except he hadn’t been at his best since last October.

The House of Lords had been in session. He was standing, talking of the madness of acceding to Fox’s demands.

Before him rose serried ranks of white wigs, beneath them the little faces with their mouths moving as they chattered to their neighbors, listening to him, listening to them…as was the custom. And yet he soldiered on, making his points for the fourth or the fifth time, because he’d discovered that no one seemed to hear him the first, and sometimes even the fifth time.

And then it felt as if those little moving faces under the white wigs were disappearing, leaving rows and rows of wigs. He blinked and kept going, but the wigs were getting bigger and then there were no faces at al . And then, thankful y, it al went away.

He was grateful. He didn’t care to be lecturing to nothing more than empty rows of wigs.

Some six months had passed since that morning. The House went into recess and came out again. He showed no further signs of keeling over, though Pitt viewed him, he thought, with a certain veiled anxiety.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about al the empty wigs, and the tiny chattering mouths under them. The fact that his father died at thirty-four didn’t help. That gave him only one year, measured against his father’s life.

His valet bustled into the room. “There’s quite a commotion below, Your Grace,” he said. Elijah was quite aware that without Vickery’s reports he wouldn’t have the faintest idea what went in his own household, although before his wife returned from Paris, these reports were brief descriptions of Cook’s lumbago, or the second footman’s propensity for pocketing silver.

“Teddy?”

Vickery laughed. “No, the devil himself is already out of the house. His lordship hired the nursemaid sent by the Registry Office this morning, and she’s taken him to the park. I’ve my doubts of her tenure, as do we al . She’s a prim one. And Master Teddy is fairly focused on”—he lowered his voice—“bodily processes, if you don’t mind the comment, Your Grace.”

Elijah snorted. “So what’s the fuss about, if not Teddy? Are we having another bal ?”

“Lady Roberta’s father sent a message saying he’l arrive this afternoon. Him as they cal the Mad Marquess. It’s luncheon with Mr. Pitt and the King today, isn’t it, Your Grace? And a meeting before that. And then in the afternoon…”

“Committee for abolishment of the liberties. Then the Serene Company of Cloth Workers at their hal in Mincing Lane.”

Vickery was a snob. “Why must you meet them?” he demanded. “Waste of your time, and they ought to make do with someone lower.”

“They are frightened that their workers wil be committed to the poorhouse,” Elijah said wearily. “They are afraid that the cheese makers are weaving their own muslin and so wil make inroads into their business. In short, they are afraid.”

“They should be afraid in private,” Vickery said with withering emphasis. He had the bath al ready. “If you please, Your Grace.”

“Why is Lady Roberta’s father coming?” Elijah asked, settling down as Vickery poured warm water over his head.

“I couldn’t say,” Vickery said, although this was nothing more than a diversion, since he always gave his opinion. “I do believe he’s thinking of staying for a time, Your Grace.”

Elijah closed his eyes as Vickery massaged his head with a liquid soap that smel ed of orange flowers. It was his one indulgence: a woman’s soap, and a woman’s practice of bathing every day. There were times when he didn’t think he could go on, morning til night, without these two minutes of watery peace.

“Wil you be home after the cloth makers?” Vickery enquired, once he began rinsing away the soap.

Elijah sat there, eyes closed, in the peculiarly vulnerable position of one who is being washed rather than washing. “No,”

he said. “After the cloth makers there’s a group of diplomats from America regarding the peace treaty. I can’t miss that.”

Vickery muttered something acid about jumped-up colonials that Elijah didn’t quite catch, but he knew what the gist of it was—that he was working himself to death.

It was an odd thought.

Death.

Or working and death in the same moment.

By al accounts, his father’s heart stopped in mid-sentence. At least, Elijah thought, it must have been painless. His faint had been painless. One minute he was standing before a row of empty wigs; the next he woke up covered with cold water flung by a hysterical clerk. It would be so, presumably: in mid-sentence, without time for regrets or second thoughts…from light to darkness.

There was a smal rebel ious voice in his head that sounded louder these days. Elijah was very afraid that the voice was saying something about his father enjoying himself before he died.

“Has there been much conversation about the duchess’s propensity for chess?” Elijah asked, feeling unutterably weary.

Vickery launched into a discussion of scandal that bounced from the duchess’s various matches—“There’s been quite a lot of interest about that, Your Grace”—to the presence of Lord Gryffyn’s il egitimate child, to the disputed centerpiece.

“But she was respectably clothed and depicting Helen of Troy,” Elijah protested. “What could possibly have upset anyone about her, unless they found her songs disreputable?”

Unfortunately, Vickery disclosed, Helen of Troy had voluntarily disrobed in the latter part of the evening. “It was almost dawn and there weren’t many people left in the bal room,” Vickery said. “By al accounts, she was most remarkably painted.

With pearls glued to her bosoms, as I heard it. Fowle said it gave him palpitations, but the footmen were more celebratory, if you conceive my meaning.”

Elijah slumped back in his bath. “Is the duchess aware this happened? Was she there?”

“Oh no, Your Grace,” Vickery said. “She had already retired to her chambers. As I said, it was very late.”

There were so many scandals brewing, Elijah thought. What was the addition of a mad marquess? With a sigh, he stood up and reached for a towel.

“No one can blame you for the situation,” Vickery said, clearly meaning to be comforting. “Fox treats his Mrs. Armistead as if she were his very wife, and the world knows she is not.”

Yet Fox’s indiscretions had worked in Elijah’s favor. He had convinced certain straitlaced gentlemen to question Fox’s judgment, based on his inordinate love for a courtesan. Lord Hol and once promised him his support purely on the basis of Fox’s indiscreet relation with Mrs. Armistead. “Wil Fox never learn the importance of character?” Hol and had demanded, looking like a plump pigeon who had eaten a worm not to his liking. Elijah could just imagine what Hol and thought of Jemma.

Not to mention the naked centerpiece, if news of her pearls and paint was abroad.

Clearly he should no longer count on votes from those scandalized by impropriety. “If you have the Americans after the cloth makers,” Vickery said, “when wil you be playing your chess move, Your Grace?”

Elijah tossed him the towel and ran his fingers through his hair. He kept it short as possible to make his wig more comfortable.

He felt slightly better, though it was truly disturbing to realize how much he would have liked to retreat to bed or perhaps wander downstairs for a chat with the marquess. He liked poetry as much as the next person, though come to think of it he hadn’t opened a book of poetry for years. “I don’t know when I’l fit it in,” he said vaguely.

After a man and master have been together for years, they grow attuned to each other’s moods. It was clear to Elijah by the time he had his stockings on that Vickery was not happy.

Vickery chose the moment when Elijah was positioning his wig to burst into a flurry of exclamations, al of which led to a few key conclusions:

The Duke of Vil iers would play his second piece without fail.

The majority of the household had bet in favor of their master winning, Vickery included, and said master needed to play in order to win.

And, final y, missing a day’s play would be taken by al of London as a sign of weakness.

When Elijah thought about it in the carriage, he realized that missing a day would presumably be akin to an admission of impotence. He leaned toward his private secretary, Ransom Cunningham.

“I must return home before the cloth makers,” he said.

Cunningham opened his mouth to protest.

Elijah raised his hand. “The chess game,” he said.

His secretary’s mouth snapped shut. Elijah almost asked him if he had bet on Vil iers or himself, but decided it was better not to know. “Do you have any idea how the betting is going in White’s?” he asked casual y.

There was a moment’s hesitation. Then: “Wel , Vil iers is ranked first in England, Your Grace,” Cunningham said with a look of pained apology.

“Humph.” Elijah settled back in his seat.

It had been years since he played a game of chess. But he knew its lineaments and its bones. There had been a day when he had been Vil iers’s only serious opponent. Of course, they had last played when they were seventeen, but stil , he fancied he had an advantage.

Not because he had once played Vil iers.

But because he was Jemma’s husband. To know an opponent was to be able to defeat him. Or her. It was exactly like politics, though he could never seem to make that clear to some idiots in government. He would meet the American diplomats and the cloth makers because, once he knew them, he could move them like little pawns around a chessboard of his own making.

The idea was rather soothing. In fact, one could say that he was better practiced for a game of chess than he had ever been in his life.

The only point that gave him the slightest hesitation was the tingling sense that it could be that he understood Americans and cloth makers better than his wife.

But that was a problem that could certainly be overcome. He added it to the great list of tasks that lived in a corner of his brain, and was consulted every hour or so. The list ranged from the smal to the very large, from check the cel ars of the house in Portman Square (for he had holdings al over the city) to strengthen connections with France, and Pitt be damned. Somewhere in the middle of the list he added:
Get to understand Jemma
.

He thought about it and then annotated the entry.

Get to understand Jemma quickly before she wallops me and costs the loyal parts of my household their annual
salaries
.

T
he Duke of Viliers spent the morning at Parsloe’s. He played a mediocre game of chess with a Russian who happened by, and then spent a solid three hours discussing queen sacrifices with Lord Corbin. It could be that Corbin might become a regular partner, which Vil iers hadn’t had since Berrow shot himself.

Damn it.

Regret always struck Vil iers as a foolish emotion, suited to poets and those who had nothing better to do with their time than weep over missteps. As in chess, as in life: it was al a vast game of attack, and one should waste no time regretting mistakes. He found it preferable to excise them from his memory.