Arching her back toward his mouth felt like the right thing too. And whimpering when he took that delicious warm mouth away.
“Darling,” he whispered
Her eyes opened lazily. “Yes?”
He pulled up her bodice and rather to Roberta’s surprise, it slid back into place as if it had always been there.
“Your father is doubtless wondering where you are. He is endearingly fond of you.”
Roberta didn’t feel like being a daughter. She felt like lying down, and she saw the same thought in his eyes. So she scowled at him. “You were no help to me whatsoever. I thought you were going to help me steer my father toward returning to the country.”
He tucked a stray curl back into the elaborate nest of curls her maids had created that morning. “It was impossible.”
“Why impossible?” she asked, feeling churlish.
“He loves you too much. Jemma and I never saw much of our parents except when my father lectured us about chess, but I can recognize parental love when I see it.”
“Because of Teddy,” she said as he opened the door.
“I should warn Teddy now,” Damon said, looking faintly horrified. “I’ll embarrass him in public, falling on my knees and imploring docile young ladies to marry him.”
Roberta sighed. “If only papa wasn’t so demonstrative. If only he didn’t cry so frequently.”
“The worst is over. Your beloved Villiers met him and he didn’t flee from the room shrieking, so what do you care about the rest of the ton?”
“I would like to go to parties,” Roberta said wistfully. “Our neighbors stopped sending us invitation years ago.”
“Oh, you will be. Your papa will take the estimable Mrs. Grope to his house and have a lovely time guarding her against the entreaties of all those gentlemen who will want to take her away from him—”
“Don’t be cruel.”
“I think what would be truly cruel is if Mrs. Grope doesn’t get at least one lure thrown out to her. He’s so hoping for rivalry.”
“He doesn’t truly want rivals.”
“A rival or two would make for some excellent poetry. At any rate, my point is that your papa and Mrs. Grope will take themselves off, and you will be chaperoned by Jemma. No one will close their doors on Jemma, for all she’s flaunted her indiscretions for years.”
“Has she indeed?”
“The fault of her foolish husband and his mistress,” Damon said. “Of course, she is a Reeve. Will the strain breed true in you, do you think?”
“Why I—” She stopped. Would she have affaires?
“Of course you will,” Damon answered her unspoken question. “Villiers is not the sort of man to demand or even desire your entire attention. You see how lucky you are that I did not appear at your New Year’s ball?”
“Why?” she asked, startled.
“Jemma can tell you that I was a most annoying brother,” he said. “I never share. And—I would never share you.”
Roberta opened her mouth to reply but there was nothing to be said.
Chapter 20
Elijah came home after the cloth makers and before the Americans, instructing his coachman to dash across London as if the hounds of hell were after him, while inside the coach he bent his head over pieces of foolscap covered with Pitt’s small, crabbed writing. They danced before his eyes: notes about French connections, about the mood in the House of Commons, about the recent election.
He strode into the house with a headache, to find his butler, Fowle, dancing before him in an ecstasy of impatience. “If you’ll please, Your Grace.”
“I have no time,” he said automatically, allowing a footman to take his cloak from his shoulders and tossing his hat on the chair. He didn’t take off his wig. It was beastly hot, but what was the point? Play the chess piece and leave the house within ten minutes and he had a chance of getting to the Americans at the appointed time.
“Your Grace,” Fowle said, “I must speak to you!”
His tone was so desperate that Elijah paused with one foot on the bottom stair.
Two moments later he pounded up those same stairs and threw open the door leading to his chambers. She was seated before the chess table, of course.
He sat down, calming himself with a fierce interior command. Jemma looked up with a smile, but her greeting died—at the look on his face, presumably.
“Am I to understand that you have moved a woman of ill repute into the house?” he said, sitting down and moving a pawn to Queen Four. He had thought out that move in five minutes between one meeting and another, and he certainly didn’t have time to reconsider it now.
She echoed his move just as quickly. Then she sat back, hands folded. “The Marquess of Wharton and Malmesbury arrived this afternoon. Surely, you were informed of his imminent visit this morning, as was I?”
“I was not informed that he arrived with a doxy in tow.”
“An unfortunate omission,” she said. “A Mrs. Grope does indeed accompany him.”
The immense injustice of it blocked his throat for a moment. “Do you have any idea,” he finally said, hearing the harsh sound of his voice behind his teeth, “what this will do to my career?”
“I don’t know. Will it cause injury?”
Her look of enquiry fueled his rage. “Don’t play the fool with me, Jemma,” he hissed at her. “You and I have been married far too long for that. I know that you are intelligent; I know that you can easily conceive why it would be a bad idea for a member of the House of Lords to invite a woman of ill repute to live in his house!”
She looked genuinely sorry. “There was nothing I could do about it, Beaumont.”
“Send them to Nerot’s Hotel!”
“I could not be so rude. There may possibly be a few straitlaced matrons who will not visit the house during her stay with us, but I am perfectly happy to hold no entertainments. That way no such matrons can have an opportunity to announce their qualms.”
“How long does she stay?”
“A few days only. The marquess talks of opening his house here in London.”
“I have a dislike of opening myself to entirely valid criticism of my household arrangements,” Elijah said. His throat closed before he could say anything further.
“I could not turn her out. But I assure you that I hadn’t the faintest idea that the marquess might pay a visit to his daughter, nor that such a person as Mrs. Grope existed.”
“How could you, indeed?” he said it woodenly. His wig felt as if it weighed a good stone.
With one swift look at him, Jemma rose and walked behind him. Automatically he began to rise, but she pushed his shoulders down and pulled off his wig. It came away with a little cloud of powder. She fluttered her hands to make it go away.
“Must you?” she asked. “Villiers never wears one.”
“He is hardly decent; he doesn’t even powder his hair. Villiers is no one.” He said it wearily, but truly. Villiers didn’t have the ear of the King, nor even the ear of Fox, Pitt’s great rival. He was no one.
“And you?” his wife said. Her fingers began to gently knead his scalp, touching him here and there. Her touch had the cool blessedness of water.
He leaned his head into her hands, a gesture of weakness and yet…She was his wife. What mattered weakness before her? She didn’t love him, nor he her, but there was a bond there, between husband and wife, that was different from any other bond.
“Perhaps,” she said, sounding uncharacteristically uncertain, “you ought to reduce your appointments, Beaumont. You don’t appear well.”
For a moment he just enjoyed the feeling of her slender fingers working through his hair, taking away the tightness of his scalp. And then her words filtered through to his brain.
“Appointments!” He swore and leapt from the chair. A moment later he snatched his wig and threw it on his head, helter-skelter. Made a leg to his lady, filing away a thought about how very beautiful she was for some other moment, and rushed
from the room.
Jemma was left, staring down at the chess table.
Chapter 21
April 14
Day three of the Villiers/Beaumont chess matches
Roberta felt as if she’d fallen through a hole in the wall and ended up in Miggery’s Traveling Circus. Events swirled around her in which she played no part. She had envisioned a grand seduction campaign. She had planned to bribe Villiers’s footmen and to trap him into marriage. She had schemed to use a substitute wedding certificate. But, in the end, what was necessary? Quote a bit from The Rape of Lucrece, wear a gown that was a trifle too small and suddenly…
Suddenly what? The Duke of Villiers had declared his intention to court her, in front of her papa, but what did that mean?
The question had kept her awake. Could it have just been an unscrupulous jest on his part? But a package was delivered the next morning. It was a soft bundle of pale blue velvet tied in ribbon, about the size of an expensive bible. When she untied it, a card fell to the floor. She snatched it up and found spiky black letters that were indubitably no one’s but Villiers’s.
I have no Familiarity with Courtship. Pray do not abuse your Power, Fair One. I find this trifle Reminds me of you.
A special volume of Shakespeare’s poetry, she thought. There was more blue velvet. And when that fell open…Not Shakespeare. It was a portrait. It showed a young country girl wearing a simple dress and holding a small cage.
“Oh, how lovely!” Jemma cried, when Roberta showed it to her a few minutes later. “It’s painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, of course. How exquisite.”
“Why do you suppose she is holding a mouse trap?” Roberta asked.
“Is that what it is?” Jemma peered closer and something indefinable crossed her face. Could it be longing—or—or jealousy? Roberta’s heart thumped. She wanted Villiers; she wanted her friendship with Jemma almost as much.
But Jemma was gay in her answer. “Darling, it’s a mousetrap because—well—you do know the old adage about marriage, don’t you?”
Roberta frowned. “A trap?”
“The parson’s mousetrap.” Jemma’s laughter sounded clear and true, and not at all tainted by jealousy.
Roberta didn’t like the portrait quite as much as she had a moment before.
“Pure Villiers,” Jemma was saying. “An exquisite, hideously expensive gift…any other man would have sent you a ruby. His present has a hidden jest.”
“It’s not as if he’s thumbing his nose at me?” Roberta asked.
“Oh no. He’s sharing the joke, don’t you see? Marriage is madness, you know. He’s making a joke of it, because one can hardly do otherwise.”
One couldn’t? Somehow…Roberta could see it otherwise. Though that was foolish beyond all measure, given that she was the same woman who planned to cold-bloodedly trick Villiers into marriage. And now that he was walking into the trap, and laughing at its boundaries, she felt uncomfortable?
“We’ll have a dinner party,” Jemma was saying. “He’ll spring the question, of course, and it will be most amusing.”
“Will he?”
“Of course he will.” Jemma peered at her. “You do realize how much a painting by Reynolds costs, don’t you?”
Roberta looked again at the odd, cunning expression in the girl’s eyes, the shadow cast by the mousetrap onto the soft muslin of the girl’s dress and the cat’s bright eyes. “You don’t think he guessed that I planned to set a trap for him?”
Jemma shrugged. “Who cares? Would you credit his earnestness if he had sent you a necklace of rubies?”
Roberta nodded.
“This is better than a necklace. Even the frame is superb. Now who shall I invite to the dinner party? It has to be just the right mix to present the proper frame for Villiers’s demise.”
“Demise”?
“It will seem so to the ton,” Jemma said. “Believe me. Ladies have set their caps at him for the past ten years, and you merely smiled at him and he surrendered. You, my dear, are about to become the toast of London.”
“Even given my father’s presence?” Roberta said faintly.
“Of course,” Jemma said. “And Mrs. Grope. Do you know, Roberta, I’m not sure that Mrs. Grope entirely shares your papa’s enthusiasm for her future career as a notorious courtesan?”
“It is my belief that she would like to marry him,” Roberta said. “I don’t think he understands that, though.”
“Men never see things,” Jemma said with a sigh. “Their marriage would cause a terrible scandal.”
“Because of her loss of character?”
“Well, yes,” Jemma said. “Look at Elizabeth Armistead, Fox’s mistress. He openly professes his affection, and I’m quite certain that he’ll marry her at some point. The bets in White’s have been running in her favor these four years. Even so, she is not received at or invited to most events.”
“Ah.”
“The ton is a brutal barometer of acceptability, I assure you. I shall have to invite some respectable women to dinner, but I must speak to Beaumont first.”
“About the dinner?”
Jemma seemed to have rethought whatever it was she was about to say, because she changed the subject entirely. “A far more crucial problem,” she said, “is which mantuamaker should receive your patronage.”
Roberta thought gratefully of the roll of banknotes her papa had given her. It made everything so much easier; she didn’t feel like a horrid pauper, dressing in Jemma’s clothing.
“I would suggest that we use a Frenchwoman,” Jemma said. “It’s not that I am inherently prejudiced against my countrywomen. Well…perhaps I am.”
Roberta burst out laughing, and in the ensuing delightful conversation, she quite forgot about the question of who was to be invited to the dinner party. “I should like a balloon hat. Do you know them, Jemma?”
Jemma nodded. “In Paris they are called lunardi. I’m not sure whether it will suit you, dearest. All those feathers…so much trimming!”
“I saw one in the park yesterday made of rose-colored French gauze with a wide brim,” Roberta said. “A young lady was wearing it quite low on one side, and high on the other.”
“Ah,” Jemma said. “That does sound interesting. The one I have is all Italian tiffany pinned in loose puckers around the brim. I liked it very much, but then the wire poked out of the brim and stuck me in the ear one day and I never wore it again.”
“Of course, the brim is wired,” Roberta said. “How clever!”
“We’ll address the dinner party later,” Jemma said. “I think we should go to Bond Street this very moment.”
Jemma didn’t think about the dinner party again until her husband appeared to play his part of the game with her. He moved as quickly as ever, knight to Queen’s Bishop Three, but Jemma was aware of a slight feeling of unease. She took her time. Finally she moved a knight to King’s Bishop Three.
“Interesting,” Elijah said, giving her move a lightning quick glance. She was learning a great deal about her husband from their game. He seemed to grasp the connotations of her moves in two seconds. In truth, the power of his mind was astonishing.
“I thought to give a dinner party this week,” she said, sitting back. He looked less tired today, although there was a deep-down exhaustion in his eyes that she found rather worrying.
“We haven’t had people to sup here since you left for Paris,” he said. He appeared to have forgotten about the offensive presence of Mrs. Grope. “Fowle will be ecstatic.”
“I thought we could come up with a guest list between the two of us,” Jemma said, “excluding anyone who would make an issue of not attending due to the marquess’s companion. Harriet will lend us consequence and she won’t make a fuss. Who would you like to invite?”
“From the House?”
“No! That is, not unless the person was a particular friend of yours.”
“A friend,” Beaumont said, almost as if he were testing the word on his tongue.
“Speaking of friends, or rather former friends,” Jemma said, watching him, “I shall invite Villiers, as he is courting Lady Roberta.”
Beaumont shrugged. His smile had a touch of wryness. “A prevarication? My distinct impression is that he is courting my wife, if the word can be used so.”
“Most gentlemen are courting three or four people at the same time. Courting is merely an activity, like eating.”
“Except that the dish in question is you,” he said. But he sounded weary, not really interested, and certainly not jealous.
“So we have the marquess and Mrs. Grope—”
“Mrs. Grope”?
Jemma smiled at his bark of laughter. “Didn’t Fowle mention her name? Roberta is not entirely certain that Mr. Grope ever existed. At any rate, we have eight of us, including Roberta, Damon and Villiers. It would be best if we added two.”
“I met someone interesting at your ball,” Beaumont said. “Miss Charlotte Tatlock.”
Jemma frowned. “One of the daughters of Sir Patrick Tatlock? I have only the slimmest acquaintance with them.”
“She seemed remarkably intelligent,” he said, pushing himself up from the table.
“Are there other persons whom you would like to see at the table? Caro shall make arrangements for me, Beaumont, but I assure you that I shall curb her imagination. She can play the pianoforte for us afterwards.”
He shook his head. “The devil with my reputation. If Pitt can’t see that I’m hardly in the debauched company of the Prince of Wales and his friends, then he can bar me his company.”
“He’s no fool.”
“I go to meet him now,” he said with a rueful smile, made his leg and departed.
Jemma went to her little writing desk. It was frustrating to realize that she was so far out of the current of English society that she didn’t know instantly who would be so overcome by curiosity as to be unable to resist the idea of dining in company with Mrs. Grope. In the end, she invited Corbin. He would never chatter about the event, even if she placed him next to Mrs. Grope.