When the Duke Returns (8 page)

“Gorgeous: rubies with a tawny yellow streak through them. They're tremendously rare. In the end the sheikh was able to garner only eight such rubies even with the lure of his harem.”

“How on earth do you know? Did you go to the wedding?”

“Of course! Vizier Takla Haymanot won, and after eleven days of feasting (Takla needed a rest after the contest), he married the sheikh's daughter. Then I bought the eight rubies from the sheikh and we were all happy.”

“Will you show me one?”

“Not at the moment. They're in the bank.”

“In a bank? If I had rubies like that—though of course their history is rather disagreeable…”

“Disagreeable? They were traded for pleasure.”

“I doubt the ladies of the harem felt so.”

“If they didn't, they did a good job disguising it. They got to choose, you know.”

Isidore felt herself turning a bit pink, but she was fascinated. “They got to choose?”

“You have to understand that this particular sheikh had two hundred and thirteen wives in his harem. And he himself was rather elderly. So the young ladies in his harem had little entertainment. The eight suitors were brought forward, and the ladies were allowed to choose. That was another aspect of the contest: if no lady chose to bed a suitor in a given round, he was out of the competition.”

“Oh!”

“You would look lovely in a harem veil,” he remarked.

If she forced a consummation to the marriage by prancing about wearing nothing but a veil, Simeon would never be granted an annulment. It was something to think about.

“I rather like the way that sheikh managed things,” Isidore said.

“Really?”

“Though if I were the princess, I would have talked the sheikh into changing the contest.”

“And?” Simeon prompted.

“I think it would be very interesting if the princess too had been able to choose her future consort, the way the ladies of the harem were. I presume the gentlemen in question were not dressed?”

He looked genuinely surprised, which was very satisfying. He needn't think he was the only one who could talk about bawdy things.

The carriage drew to a halt and she automatically started putting her gloves back on.

Simeon reached over and pulled one away.

“What—”

Then he snatched the other. And finally, when the carriage door opened, he flung them straight out into the street. They flew past the face of a startled groomsman, who gave a little shriek and stumbled backward, falling onto his bottom.

“You are utterly deranged!” Isidore said with conviction, leaning forward to look at the street. “I can't go to my appointment without gloves.” Sure enough, her blue gloves were lying in a puddle of blackened rainwater.

“You hate them,” Simeon said, leaping out of the carriage and holding out his own ungloved hand.

She ground her teeth and then put her hand in his.

The shock of heat she felt was entirely unreasonable.

65 Blackfriars Street
February 27, 1784

T
hey were before a row of houses, in a part of London Simeon didn't know. Not that he really knew London. “Doesn't your mantua-maker own a shop?” he asked. The groomsman was standing at the door of a small house.

“We are visiting Signora Angelico's studio, Cosway,” Isidore told him. “This is a great honor, extended only to her countrywomen, so please try to behave yourself.”

“Couldn't you call me by my given name?”

“It's not polite.”

He ignored that. “My name is Simeon. It's a good, workable name and I thank God I didn't end up Godfrey, like my poor brother.”

“We're not supposed to call each other by given names.”

“I already call you Isidore.”

“I didn't give you permission to do so!”

“Every time you call me Cosway, it sounds like cock to me,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe you should go right on calling me Cosway, and I'll just—”

Isidore laughed. “Fine. Simeon.”

Signora Angelico worked in a large open room on the bottom floor. The first thing Simeon saw were the open shelves that lined the room. Rolled cloth—silk, satin, taffeta—was stacked to the topmost level. It reminded him of souks in Morocco. The colors glowed coyly from the ends of the rolls, deep red silk, lilac shot with silver, the clear yellow of buttercups in early spring. Below the cloth were boxes, filled to the brim and spilling forth their contents: thread, buttons, yards and yards of ribbon. Everywhere there was lace. Lace hanging from wooden poles, lace thrown into piles, thin rivulets of lace and fatter rivers of it heaped on the tables that scattered the room.

Isidore had walked directly into the room, while Simeon paused on the threshold. Now she was dropping a deep curtsy before a woman in late middle age, with a deliciously curvy figure. The mantua-maker was kissing Isidore energetically on both cheeks, calling her
bella.

Then they both turned and looked at him.

Simeon walked forward and swept into a flourishing bow. “Duke,” Isidore said, “may I present Signora Angelico?”

“
Onorato di conoscerla, signora.”

Isidore raised an eyebrow. “I had no idea you spoke Italian.”

“I don't really, but I can improvise from Portuguese.” He turned back to Signora Angelico who was declaring herself
felicissima
to encounter, finally, the
marito
of her darling little duchess, whom she had loved since the moment she first saw her.

“Signora Angelico made gowns for my aunt for many years,” Isidore explained.

“Your aunt?”

“I lived with my aunt after we married.”

“Of course! Your aunt.”

“Augustina Del'Fino,” Isidore filled in.

So he didn't know every bit of information about what she'd been doing for the last eight years since they married…well, perhaps it was more than eight years.

Signora Angelico turned away, her hands in the air, scattering her seamstresses in all directions.

“How long have we been married?” Simeon inquired.

Isidore glanced at him. She would make an excellent politician; she had a way of putting a fellow in his place with nothing more than a raised eyebrow. “Don't you remember?”

“Why would I ask if I did?” he said, surprised.

“We were engaged in June, 1765, married by proxy in June, 1773.”

“Of course. You said you were twelve when we actually married.”

Signora Angelico was gesticulating madly from the other side of the room.

“And you were eighteen.”

“I was in India. How long did you live with my mother?”

“A matter of a few months. I'm afraid that we were not suited temperamentally, and we all agreed that I would be happier with my aunt.” She turned away. “
Cara signora, arriviamo!
”

Signora Angelico was chattering away with Isidore in Italian, so rapidly that Simeon couldn't follow. She was pulling bolts of cloth from the shelves and throwing them on the table, screaming at her assistants, waving her hands around…

Simeon went back to thinking. So Isidore went to live with her aunt and presumably expected him to collect her up at some point.

Signora turned away so he said to her, “Just when did you think I'd come back for you?”

“When I was sixteen.”

“But that was—”

“Seven years ago.”

He stared down at her.

“You've been waiting for me for
seven years
?”

“What did you think I've been doing?” And she turned away, cooing over the signora's choice of cloth.

Simeon stared down at the bolt of fabric. It was spun of a material so fine that it looked like cobwebs, and yet he knew he had finer in his warehouses. He had shipped home trunks of fabric.

“Did you ever receive fabric I sent from India?”

She glanced up at him and her eyes were like chips of blue ice now. “They must have gone as astray as you yourself.”

With a sinking feeling, he remembered that he sent everything to his mother's direction, who then refused acceptance. It seemed a strange decision on his part, now he thought of it.

He had chosen beautiful pieces and put them to the side, sending them home with instructions that they be delivered to the duchess. It was only now dawning on him that there really were—and had been for years—two duchesses.

The mantua-maker was matching the silvery fabric with a delicate lace tinted a faint blue. Isidore would look like the snow princess in a Russian fairy tale, the ones in which the princess had a heart of ice.

“I don't like it,” he said abruptly.

Signora Angelico was clearly not used to being interrupted—nor to being countered. She flew into a paroxysm of exclamations, half in English, half in Italian.

Isidore turned to him and hissed, “You can't say that sort of thing to Signora Angelico! The Queen of France herself has ordered night clothing from signora.”

“I don't care whether she sews the king's slippers with her teeth,” Simeon said. “This fabric isn't of the quality I'd like you to wear. I may not care much for polite society, Isidore, but I know fabric.”

“You wouldn't—”

He turned to Signora Angelico. She was as ruffled as a hen in the rain, her cheeks stained with crimson, her hands waving wildly around her head.

But Simeon had bargained with many a tradesman in places where to lose the bargain was to lose one's head. “This fabric isn't good enough,” he said.

“Not good enough!” Signora Angelico's face took on a purple hue. “This is the very best,
magnifico,
lovely in every way, fit for—”

Simeon rubbed it between his fingers and shook his head. “Indian silk.”

“Silk from the looms of the Maharaja himself—”

Simeon shook his head. “Signora, signora…surely you don't take me for a dunce?” He pushed the fabric to the side and sat on the table.

“Get up!” Isidore said to him in an urgent undertone. “You can't sit before us.”

Simeon snapped his fingers at one of the girls, who
were flocking nervously against the wall as if they thought he would faint merely from the signora's frown. “Chairs for Her Grace and Signora Angelico.”

Two of them scuttled over with straight-backed chairs, used by the girls while they engaged in hand-sewing. Perfect. Signora Angelico was now seated just below him. He smiled down at her. “I can tell that you are a woman who adores fabric,” he cooed. “A woman ravished by antherine silk, so glossy and light, perhaps with a touch of mignonette lace.”

Signora's whole face changed. “You know your fabrics, Your Grace.”

He smiled at her. “Now this—” he put a finger disdainfully on the silk she proposed. “Paduasoy. A nice strong silk. Perhaps good enough for some. But not,” and he gave every word a tiny emphasis, “not for my wife, signora.”

“You!” she said. “You are going to lead my poor little duchess on a chase, are you not?” Her black eyes snapped, but he could feel the rigid backs of her girls relax.

“It is a man's duty when faced with such beauty as graces my wife,” he said solemnly, reaching down and bringing her hand to his lips. “Of course, had I seen you in my youth…”

Signora bounced to her feet. “As if I could have been tempted by such a callow young thing as a raw duke!” She clapped her hands. “Lucia! Bring me that bolt of tiffany.”

“Dare I hope the tiffany harks from the looms of Margilan?”

“You will see!” she crowed.

Isidore sat in her chair, stunned into silence. After that, Signora Angelico was putty in Simeon's hands. He rejected the tiffany as too harsh; they finally found a taf
feta he found acceptable. It was cherry red, with only a touch of stiffness to it.

“I see it falling to the ground with a froth at the feet and a small train.”

“But the color…” Signora Angelico shook her head. “If only I had a—”

“Wash it in tea.”

“Wash this fabric in tea?” She looked down at the fabric. It looked as if it had been woven by fairies; if you let it fall through your fingers it sounded like a whispered song.

“Of course,” Simeon said. He kissed her hand again, and that was that. Isidore was to have a gown of tea-washed taffeta, edged in a thin border of glossy lace made in Brussels.

The signora was drunk with the garment she saw in her imagination. “Coming to the mid finger,” she murmured to herself, “
décolletage,
of course.”

“Are we finished?” Isidore asked, standing up.

“Tsk, tsk,” Simeon said. “These things take time.”

“Not for me,” Isidore retorted, looking to make sure that Signora Angelico wasn't listening. She wasn't; she looked as dreamy as her aunt had while practicing a new sonata. “The first cloth would have been just fine. I can't imagine why you took such an interest, since the nightdress will presumably be for another's man's pleasure!”

Simeon opened his mouth—and closed it. She had a point. Isidore was intoxicating; he tended to forget everything in her presence.

“We could have been home by now,” Isidore said. “I have another appointment.” She glanced down at the watch she wore on a ribbon and gave a little shriek. “And I'm late.
If
you please!”

“I must return to Revels House immediately,” Simeon
said in the carriage. “There are a few outstanding problems with the estate. I'll return to London next week and we can continue the discussion of our annulment.”

Isidore looked at him. “Certainly,” she said. “If I happen to be in residence.”

He looked absurdly surprised, given that her tone had been quite mild.