How To School Your Scoundrel (30 page)

A loud crash sounded in his ears, and Hassendorf’s arms went limp.

Somerton staggered to his feet and turned. His ears seemed full of cotton wool. The Duke of Ashland stood before him, tall and avenging. The smoke still trailed from the barrel of his revolver.

“Thank you,” Somerton mouthed.

And then he saw what lay beyond Ashland.

The canopy, billowing with flame as it drifted down on a horrified Luisa.

Noooo
, he screamed silently.

Before he realized his own actions, he was running toward her, through the flames and smoke, the bits of ash. He found her shoulders and brought her down beneath him, taking the brunt of the fall on his knees, and covered her with his body as the flames scorched through his jacket.

Blackness fell, thick as pitch, seething with inhuman pain. He let himself sink inside the dark, and even as he drifted out of conscious thought, the pain went on and on, unstoppable.

There were hands on him, cloths beating his body, water drenching the searing agony, sweet and fleeting relief.

There was Luisa’s voice—
alive, thank God, thank God
—calling him a fool, her darling fool, her love, don’t die, don’t leave me.

He opened his eyes, and her beautiful face was before him, wet with tears.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll never leave you.”

•   •   •

W
hen he opened his eyes again, some untold hours or days later, he was in a bed, on his stomach, and someone was changing the dressing on his back. The pain of this act enclosed every nerve of his body.

The pain, in fact, had woken him up.

“Ah! There you are, my dear nephew,” said the Duke of Olympia.

“You again.” Somerton closed his eyes and ground his teeth together. “Where’s my wife, damn it?”

“She’s sleeping, and I refuse to disturb her. It’s the first sleep she’s had in forty-eight hours.”

“When can I see her?”

“If the bishop has his way, not for a month at least.”

At that, Somerton summoned the energy to lift his head. The duke was gazing down at him, curse the old scratch, from a chair pulled up next to the unconscionably soft bed on which Somerton lay.

“The bishop? What the bloody hell does the bishop have to do with it?”

“Because the Bishop of Holstein is the chap to whose unenviable lot it now falls, Somerton, to look after the eternal health of your black soul.”

“The devil you say!”

“Indeed. And I daresay he rightfully suspects that if you were to lay eyes upon the fair Luisa, you would shortly contrive to bed her, whatever the extent of your injuries.”

The attendant stripped off the last dressing, in a stroke of white-hot agony.

“And why the devil shouldn’t I bed my own lawfully wedded wife? I bloody well nearly sacrificed my life for her sake! I’ve been thrown in dungeons, chased, shot, wrestled, and burned, and worst of all, I haven’t had the pleasure of my wife’s body in weeks. Weeks! By God, she won’t be able to walk straight, by the time I’ve had my fill of her. And neither will I, if I know my Markham.”

A gasp disturbed the air above his head.

A smile spread across Olympia’s face.

“My very dear, very wicked fellow. I assure you, I applaud your conjugal enthusiasm without reserve. But . . .” He let the word dangle.

“But?
But?
”

The duke leaned close.

“But it seems the people of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof refuse to be cheated out of a royal wedding after all.”

One month later

H
is Royal Highness, the Prince Consort of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, crossed the threshold of the state bedroom and kicked the door emphatically shut.

“At last,” he said. “I thought that chap with the pointed gray beard would go on bloody forever.”

From the shelter of his arms, Her Royal Highness the Crown Princess kicked off one satin shoe, and then the other. “Bite your tongue. Herr Lowenbrau is the master of the brewers’ guild and a very dear fellow. And like everyone else in the room—everyone in the entire principality, to be precise—he can’t quite believe his good fortune in gaining such a brave and warriorlike consort to rule by my side.”

“Well, he was the last man standing between my lavish royal wedding banquet and my lavish royal wedding night, and by God he’s lucky to be alive.” He cast his gaze about the room, the sumptuous furnishings and gilded crest work, falling at last on the massive canopied bed at the end of the room, atop a small dais, the pillows invitingly plump. “Good God. Is that my marriage bed or a damned stage at the theater?”

“We are, after all, supposed to be performing a public duty,” said his wife primly.

He looked down at her blushing face, which had been kept altogether too distant from his own in the past few weeks. “Markham,” he said, “let me make myself quite clear. I will execute whatever demands you make of me; I will cut ribbons and christen ships and make speeches until my ears bleed; I will know your enemies’ thoughts before they can think them up themselves. I will pay the Americans with my own gold to keep Dingleby occupied with her new friends on the other side of the Atlantic. I have already allowed myself to be made patron of twelve different charities, including the Society for the succor of stray cats, God help us all. But in this room, in this bed, there are only two of us. Man and wife. Pleasing only each other. Do you understand me?”

“Quite.” She smiled and looped her arms around his neck. “You can put me down now, if you like.”

“On the contrary,” he said, striding toward the bed, “I promise you your feet won’t touch the ground until morning, if I can help it.”

She had already untied his starched neckcloth and was flinging it on the plush carpet beneath them. “No? But my feet so enjoyed touching the ground on our first wedding night.”

“Hmm. Yes.” He tossed her on the bed and tore off his priceless silk wedding coat, embroidered with the Holstein crest in at least a dozen places. “But I was a reckless young fellow then. With time—and a second wedding in Holstein bloody Cathedral, complete with trumpets and bishop and medieval bloody crown—comes respect for the proper decorum.”

She laughed and held out her arms. Her lady’s maid had already changed her clothing, from the voluminous ivory brocade gown that weighed nearly as much as she did, into a diaphanous negligee of fine Parisian silk and lace, through which the twin dark circles of her nipples were plainly visible and plainly aroused. “Decorum? The Earl of Somerton?”

Somerton, now shirtless, grasped the hem of her negligee and drew it up and over her head. Her creamy nakedness made his brain spin. He threaded his fingers through hers and urged her backward, into the mattress, his darling beautiful Markham, his own wedded wife, bound to him twice over. In a moment, he would boil over from the joy of it.

“I’ll show you decorum,” he growled, bending his head over her breast. “Just mind the skin of my back, if you please. What’s left of it.”

An hour later, he lay on his stomach, teasing his wife’s silken hair with his fingers. It had grown out a bit this past month, curling around her ears now, shining and playful. He took up a few strands and kissed them. Her eyelids fluttered. “What was that?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Mmm. I thought I heard something.”

“Not a word.” He nibbled her shoulder. “The delirium of your pleasure, no doubt.”

“No. No, I quite distinctly heard you say something. A few words only. Simple little words.” Her eyes were still closed, but she was smiling. One hand traced along his side, carefully avoiding his tender back; the other lay draped above her head, a most voluptuous pose that was already stirring blood he’d thought must surely be quieted at last, after the recent thunderbolt between them. “
Ich
 . . .
ich
something something.”

“A hallucination, I assure you.”

“Something with an
L
, I believe.”

“An
L
, you say?”

“Perhaps, if I say them first, the words will jog your memory.”

He lifted himself on one elbow and gazed down at her face, still flushed with release, smooth with contentment. An auburn curl whorled on her forehead, touching one eyebrow. He drew it aside. “Perhaps they will.”

“All right.” Her eyes opened at last, true and topaz-brown, meeting him without a flinch. “Husband. Scoundrel. Noble consort.” She raised her hand to clasp his cheek and whispered to him with her true and noble lips.

The air turned into gold.

He bent his head, kissed her, and whispered back.

Ich liebe dich
.

Holstein Castle

December 1892

A
t three o’clock in the morning, as the snow landed softly on the ledge outside his bedroom window, the Duke of Olympia was awoken by his valet and told that a young lady awaited him downstairs in the state bedroom.

“A young lady, is it?” He threw off the covers and snatched away his nightcap from his whitening head. “At this hour? By God, she had better not be shrill.”

In the hallway, he was forced to shield his eyes, for the castle was ablaze with light. A single loud crack from the cannon on the rooftop made him jump almost to the ceiling. “Damn it all,” he said, “she’d better be comely as well, the hoyden.”

“Yes, sir,” said his valet, brushing hastily at the duke’s dressing gown as he strode magnificently down the crimson hallway.

“How I despise these females who arrive in the middle of the night, demanding all manner of fuss and attention. It’s frightfully common, don’t you think? Vulgar, really.” He turned smartly around the corner, where the hallway opened up into the second-floor gallery.

“Yes, sir. Common, indeed.”

“Give me a plump, smiling, well-favored damsel who arrives promptly in the evening, just after dinner, when everybody is settled and content and ready for a bit of civilized entertainment before bed.”

The duke strode across the gallery, sparing not a glance for the portraits on the walls, nor the fearsome six feet of ancient plate armor standing guard before the east wing, as it had once stood guard before the Saracens at Antioch. His slippers made scuffing sounds on the polished marble, until he reached the soft comfort of the carpeted corridor.

“Convenient, to be sure,” said the valet, whose task it was to agree with Olympia’s every pronouncement.

“Or better yet, give me a pretty young lad. Far less trouble and expense, and a good deal sturdier.”

“Indeed, sir. Shall I make you up a toddy of some sort, sir, to recruit you afterward from your labors?”

Olympia came to an abrupt halt, several feet shy of the handsome louvered double doors of the state bedroom. He tapped his chin. A long peal of laughter rang out through the wooden panels, followed by an infant’s wail.

“No,” he said, “I think not. A double measure of neat Scotch should do very well.”

The valet placed his hand on the door handle and opened the portal wide. “Very good, sir.”

The Duke of Olympia swept through the doorway and into a scene of unprecedented debauchery. At one end of the room, Hatherfield was playing cards with an eight-year-old Lord Kildrake, who held an unlit cigar in his mouth and looked as if he were winning handily. Nearby, Lady Roland Penhallow sat beautifully on a red velvet sofa, deep in feminine conversation with Lady Mary Russell, the curiously dark-haired and dark-eyed daughter of the fair-featured Duke of Ashland, who himself stood propped like a masked six-and-a-half-foot white-haired Adonis at the mantel with a sherry at his elbow and his wife’s burgeoning waist shielded possessively under his enormous hand.

That damned Emilie, breeding again. Hadn’t she the good sense to find her husband a mistress?

A peal of laughter diverted his attention to the other end of the room, where Princess Stefanie was leading Ashland’s strapping eighteen-year-old heir Lord Silverton in an impromptu demonstration of a Bavarian folk dance, while Lord Roland Penhallow kept perfect time with a pair of slim silver candlesticks on the back of a priceless Louis Quatorze chair. Upon that chair rested His Royal Highness the Prince Consort of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, looking drowsily drunk and decidedly pleased with himself as he surveyed the pandemonium before him. A cello lay in an open case on the floor next to his feet. The bow dangled from one hand.

Olympia marched up and clapped him on the back. “Well, then, nevvy! Banished from the bedchamber, were you?”

Somerton nodded. “Was only trying to help.”

“So it goes.”

“A fine girl, however.” He smiled happily. “Ginger, just like her mother. All well. They’re resting now, of course.”

Another determined wail sallied forth from the bedroom on the other side of the wall.

“Or perhaps not,” said Olympia. “Was the travail a difficult one?”

The happy smile collapsed. “God, yes. Horrifying. Penhallow had to pin me forcibly to the chair, just before the end.” A slow shake of the head. “I don’t know how I survived it.”

“I see. Scotch?”

“Brandy.”

“Is there any left, by chance?”

“I doubt it,” the prince said mournfully.

The bedroom door opened, and a fortyish woman in a neat uniform of dove gray slipped out to cast a disapproving glance around the august receiving room of the royal bedchamber.

Princess Stefanie dropped Silverton’s hands and clasped her own together. “Oh! How are they, Nurse Muller?”

Philip set his cards carefully on the table, facedown, and stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray. “I want to see my sister! I want to see my sister!”

“You may see your newest little sister in the morning, your lordship,” said Nurse Muller, in her English-trained voice of no nonsense.

“But it
is
morning!”

Lady Roland rose hastily from the sofa. “Now, Philip. You must do as Nurse Muller says.”

“Out,” said Nurse Muller. “All of you, out. You’re making altogether too much noise, and it’s long past Lord Kildrake’s bedtime.”

“Papa Roland said I could stay up,” said Lord Kildrake. “And Father gave me this cigar.” He held it up.

Nurse Muller looked horrified. She snatched the cigar from his fingers. “His Highness was not in his right mind, your lordship. Now, off with you. To bed in the nursery with your little cousins.”

She made shooing motions with her hands, and one by one the members of the royal family tossed down the dregs of the remaining sherry, put away the candlesticks, and disbanded for the various bedrooms in the castle, as well as the royal nursery, which was filled almost to capacity at the moment in the overflow of visitors for the much-anticipated birth. Little Lady Stephanie Lambert and her cousins the Ashland twins—a more mischievous damned pair of two-year-old boys Olympia had never known—lay side by side with the cherubic Honorable Miss Florence Penhallow and her baby brother Phineas, while Olympia suspected that Princess Stefanie was headed upstairs to nurse the two-month-old ginger-haired Lord Hatherfield (like her sisters, Stefanie would insist on feeding the infants herself, despite the availability of several perfectly good wet nurses in the district) this very minute.

At the moment, however, and for the man now rising from the much-abused Louis Quatorze chair, the new little princess testing her lungs in the room next door was the only baby in the world.

Certainly, the principality of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof had been awaiting this moment for two anxious years. And judging from the often drawn faces of the baby princess’s parents during that period, and those quickly shuttered gazes of longing frustration at the multiplying collection of cousins and half siblings, Olympia suspected that Leopold and Luisa had suffered more than one tragic disappointment along the journey to Her tiny Highness’s arrival this snow-scented December night.

“Come along, then, Your Highness,” said Nurse Muller, far more kindly. “They’re both awake, and the little princess is eager to meet her father.”

Olympia turned away at the look on Somerton’s face, the passing expression of raw emotion, as if someone had placed a hand on his heart to count the measure of its beating.

“And Your Grace as well, of course,” added the nurse, blushing just a trifle as she met his eye.

Olympia followed Somerton’s broad silk back at a respectful distance. Over a quarter century ago, he had followed another nurse into this very room, in order to meet his recently arrived niece Luisa. The chamber hadn’t changed much. The same stately furniture in blues and golds, the same priceless rug, the same window seat with its breathtaking view of the town and the mountains beyond, now hidden behind great shrouds of midnight damask. He paused just inside the doorway, so as not to interrupt the new parents.

The princess was at her mother’s breast. Luisa looked up, and the smile on her exhausted face made Olympia blink rather forcefully. She said something to Somerton as he approached; Olympia couldn’t quite hear what it was, thank God, for he despised all that mawkish sentiment that turned the air of the castle so distastefully sticky when all the husbands and wives were visiting together.

Somerton reached the bedside in a few long strides. He took his wife’s outstretched hand, fell to his knees, and pressed his lips to her fingers.

At the foot of the bed, a small white and rufous corgi lifted his head from his paws and growled at Olympia, low and menacing. The duke rolled his eyes and went to stand near the window seat.

For God’s sake, not Somerton, too. Was there no husband left alive in this palace who maintained a proper sense of reserve where his wife was concerned? Olympia opened the curtains a crack and observed the snowflakes drifting by the millions, the lights flickering ablaze all over the town, the faint sounds of revelry drifting up the hill to celebrate the birth of the longed-for heir to the throne.

Something tickled the corner of his right eye; he rubbed it quickly, before anyone noticed.

A weight settled into the cushion nearby. Olympia looked down at the slight man who sat there in a satisfied posture, thumbs in his pockets. The doctor, he remembered. He sat down next to the fellow in a friendly manner.

“Congratulations, my good man,” he said, in German. “I understand the labor was a difficult one.”

The doctor looked surprised. “Why, no more than most. A textbook delivery, in fact. The husband took the hour of crisis exceptionally hard, however.”

Olympia risked another glance at the royal bedside, and nearly slipped off the cushions to the floor.

The prince consort was actually
holding
the baby. Holding his daughter in his arms, as if he were a nurse! Holding her as delicately and reverently as he might hold a first-class revolver, or a particularly promising new pup for his hunting pack. The candlelight bathed the princess’s round new head in reddish gold. Her father touched her downy ginger hair with one finger and said something soft, something suspiciously like a croon. He turned to his wife and murmured a few words that made her smile broadly.

By God. What would come next? Did the old scoundrel plan to strap on a teat and nurse her himself?

Olympia shook his head.

“Is something the matter, Your Grace?” asked the doctor. “Such a fine portrait of a family I never saw before.”

“Only reflecting how very unexpectedly one’s schemes can turn out.” Olympia rose to his feet and tightened the belt of his dressing gown. “It’s almost enough to put one off scheming altogether.”

He walked to the happy threesome, congratulated his niece and nephew on a most blessed event, and went back to bed.