“Are you planning to play him in chess?” Harriet said, feeling hopefulness tighten in her chest like a vise.
“It wasn’t that. It’s my guest, Roberta. Lady Roberta St. Giles. She’s in love with him.”
“In love with Villiers?” Harriet smiled weakly. “I believe I pity her.”
“Was he a friend of Benjamin’s, then?”
“Villiers played Benjamin all the time, but he never allowed any stakes. Which was just a condescending way of telling Benjamin that he was unlikely to win. Then finally Benjamin challenged him and Villiers agreed to play. Benjamin played well in the beginning. But now, I think that Villiers may have been just playing along.”
“I see,” Jemma said, holding her hands tightly.
“And Benjamin started to raise the stakes on the game. I gather that Villiers refused and Benjamin got so angry—it was when he was winning, or he thought he was winning—that he forced Villiers to give in. That’s what everyone told me afterwards.”
“And then…”
“I don’t think Benjamin realized at first. But he must have gone home and thought over the game, step by step. I was in the country, you see. I wasn’t there; perhaps if I’d been in London I could have stopped him somehow. At any rate, he must have realized that Villiers had just been babying him. That he never had a chance of winning that game.”
“Benjamin loved chess that much,” Jemma said.
“He should have loved me that much!”
Jemma sighed. “Chess is a passion.”
“The problem was that Benjamin was too good to play most people, and not quite good enough for the very best. He used to try to get your husband to play with him; he even said that he would trade a game for his vote in Lords.”
“Ha,” Jemma said. “He misstepped there. Beaumont has one god: his honor.”
“Beaumont just said that he never played anymore. He doesn’t, does he?”
“Not so far as I know. I only played him a few times when we were first married.”
“Did you beat him? Your husband, I mean?”
“Yes. But he was awfully good.”
“Is there anyone you haven’t beaten, Jemma?”
“Every chess player loses occasionally. I only played one game with the French king and he won.”
“King Louis? Then you allowed him to win,” Harriet said with a little crooked smile.
“Prudence is part of strategy,” Jemma said. “But you know I haven’t played very many people, Harriet, so it hardly signifies.”
“You’ve never played Villiers?”
“Never. I only met him once and that briefly. He was traveling on the continent during the first year of my marriage, and I’ve been in Paris since.”
“They say he’s the best player in England.” She took a deep breath. “I hate him for what he did to Benjamin.”
Jemma blinked. “What did he do?”
“He shamed him. And I think he did it deliberately. I’ve thought and thought about it. I think he agreed to play the game in White’s, just to make Benjamin stop nagging at him. And then—and then Benjamin lost, of course, but Villiers had played it so that Benjamin thought he would win.”
“But—”
Harriet wasn’t finished. “He’s an awful man. A positive wolf. He had affaires with half the ton, if you believe the stories, and he treats all his lovers despicably. They say he has at least four illegitimate children.”
There was a noise at the door and Jemma came back with a tea tray.
Harriet drank half of her tea in one gulp. “I want you to do me a favor, Jemma.”
Jemma reached to the sugar bowl. “Anything, dearest.”
“I want you to shame Villiers.”
She straightened. “What? Shame him—how?”
“I don’t care!” Harriet said fiercely. “You could take him as a lover, and spurn him. Or take him as a lover and make fun of him, or something like that. I know you can do it.”
Jemma was giggling. “I love your faith in my abilities,” she said. “But—”
“You could play chess with him.”
There was a moment’s silence. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You came from the country not to see me, but to ask me to play chess with Villiers?”
Their eyes met. “I came to see you, Jemma. We’re not as close as we were when we were children. You’ve changed; you’ve grown sophisticated, and even more beautiful, and I’m just a country mouse.”
Jemma’s eyes had assessed her brown curls and her clumsily handled panniers; she must know it was the truth.
“I didn’t live in the city with Benjamin,” Harriet said, though her throat was so tight she could hardly speak it. “I just couldn’t make this life work, putting my hair up, and powdering it, and taking hours to get dressed. Having a maid, and a dresser, and all the rest of it bores me. I just couldn’t stand the boredom!”
“I can understand that, of course,” Jemma said. “It can be quite tedious.” She smiled, but she was cooler now, more distant.
“So I left Benjamin here and I went to the country,” Harriet stumbled on.
“You couldn’t have stopped him from loving chess,” Jemma said.
Harriet felt a wave of desperation. “You don’t understand!” She almost shouted it.
“What?”
“I couldn’t be around him, because—because—”
“Many couples live apart,” Jemma said. “It certainly isn’t your fault that Benjamin committed suicide, simply because you were living in the country. You could not have stopped him from losing a game to Villiers.”
“You don’t understand,” Harriet said. She lifted her chin. “I had an affaire with Villiers.”
Jemma sat bolt upright. “You had an affaire?”
It was such a relief to tell someone that the words tumbled out. “It was two years ago, at a ball given by the Duchess of Claverstill, about a month before Benjamin died. Benjamin was playing chess all night. Every ball has a chess room now. It’s so tiresome. Some nights there aren’t any partners for dancing. At any rate, Villiers came out of the chess room and, somehow, he found me.”
“What is he like? I don’t know much about him, other than that he was a boyhood friend of Beaumont’s and they had some sort of falling out.”
“I hate him,” Harriet said, her voice shaking.
“Because you spent the night with him?” To Harriet’s relief, Jemma had lost her air of froideur. She poured more tea for both of them.
“Because—he didn’t really—it was just like the game with Benjamin!”
“What?”
She might as well tell the whole. “The truth of it is that we didn’t really have an affaire. I was so cross at Benjamin that I just—well, I lost my head. Villiers was taking me home and—and—but he—”
“You’re going to have to be a bit more clear,” Jemma said. “Based on my rather varied experience of men, I’d say that he made an advance to you in the carriage?”
“No,” Harriet said, drinking again. “I did.”
“Excellent decision,” Jemma said promptly. “Frenchwomen understand that a woman must pick and choose amongst her admirerers rather than leaving it to the man’s discretion.”
“There are no men for me,” Harriet said miserably. “Benjamin was the only one.”
“So what happened with Villiers?”
“He kissed me for a bit, but then—well—this is so embarrassing. He did this thing.”
Jemma’s eyes were bright with interest. “What thing?”
“With—with his hands. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.”
“Even if I pour you some more tea?”
“Even then. So I—I—”
“What did you do? I gather you didn’t just swoon and say, Touch me again!” Jemma was giggling so hard that her tea was in danger of spilling.
“Well, I said, actually I shrieked, What are you doing? And he just did it again!”
“And it wasn’
t any better the second time?”
“What would you have done?” Harriet asked desperately.
“It would definitely depend on the thing in question. I enjoy many things that men do with their hands.”
“You’re so much more sophisticated than I am. I’m not like that. I slapped him. Which is just what my mother, not that my mother would ever, well, it’s what she would have approved of, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure,” Jemma said, gurgling with laughter. “What did he do?”
Harriet took a deep breath. “I’m going to tell you exactly what he said.”
“I’m ready.”
“He said that he had always pitied Benjamin for his miserable chess-playing, but from now on he would try to be nicer to him.”
“Nasty!” Jemma said looking impressed.
“And then he said that there was nothing worse than a lady whore. And that I had tried to get him to screw one of his best friends, and he must be drunk, because he’d forgotten how damn boring women like me were. And finally he said that if I told Benjamin he would kill me.”
The laughter had died on Jemma’s face. “That bastard!”
“And then he put me out on the street. In the middle of Whitefriars Lane and I didn’t have even a ha’penny. I had to walk all the way home.”
“Double bastard!”
“I never told Benjamin. I left for the country the next day because I was such a coward that I couldn’t face him. I felt so guilty and so—so dirty! But then someone wrote me and said they had announced in Parsloe’s—”
“What’s that?”
“The London Chess Club meets at Parsloe’s. They only take one hundred members, and it’s frightfully exclusive. At any rate, a week or so afterwards they announced that Villiers would be playing Benjamin, in public and for stakes, at White’s. So I knew why Villiers did it. Because of me.”
“Perhaps…”
“I can’t imagine why I flirted with him,” Harriet said. “You’d think I would have had enough of men who prefer to caress pieces of ivory rather than me. It was so paltry of me. And how—how terribly wrong it all went.”
“Life can be like that,” Jemma said quietly.
“And now,” Harriet said, hearing the rank desperation in her own voice, “I just want Villiers humiliated somehow. It’s all I can think of. I have to make it right for Benjamin. I have to clear my slate. I have to, Jemma!”
Jemma reached out and took her hand. “Benjamin is gone, Harriet. There’s no slate.”
“Please.”
Jemma sat still for a moment. Then: “I wouldn’t do this because of the chess match. I can understand Benjamin’s mortification at losing that match. I could never take my life, but I can understand the horror of losing. Benjamin’s reaction wouldn’t be Villiers’s fault. Truly, Harriet. It’s the chess.”
“I hate chess.” She said it flatly, but with utter conviction.
“I’ll do it because he was an utter bastard to leave you in the road, and to say those things, Harriet. No one says something like that to a friend of mine and gets away with it scot-free. The only problem is that I shall have to be rather subtle.”
“Why? I would prefer that he be shamed in front of all London.”
“Because,” Jemma said, “I told you that Roberta is desperately in love with Villiers. She’s determined to marry him, and I promised I would help her.”
“How on earth are you going to humiliate him at the same time as you push him into marriage?” Harriet began to wring her hands.
But Jemma was grinning again. “The two things are by no means mutually exclusive, you know. And I love a challenge. The first thing I’ll do is invite him to my ball.”
“He and Beaumont never speak; he won’t come.”
“He will,” Jemma said. “Leave that to me. Now, are you coming?”
Harriet gulped. “Would you mind very much if I didn’t, Jemma? I can’t tell you how horrible it has been since Benjamin died. Everyone looks at me with sympathy except for people who believe I drove him to it. Lady Lacock always tells me that Benjamin was a cheerful baby, until I feel as if I could scream.”
“We have to solve that too,” Jemma said.
“My life? Some other night,” Harriet said.
“Of course. But you must come for a council of war tomorrow morning.”
“Please, Jemma…may I decline? I promised I would return to the country as soon as possible.”
“Who did you promise? You should be here for the season, Harriet, thinking about marrying again. You can’t stay a dour widow forever.”
“I know,” Harriet said, and then, desperate to change the subject, “I still don’t think you’ll be able to get Villiers to enter this house.”
Jemma just smiled.
Chapter 5
Roberta would be the first to admit that life with her father had not been designed to turn a young lady into a leader in fashion. It wasn’t that her father had no money; she rather suspected that he had quite a lot. But his priorities were directed in precisely the opposite direction than everything about which Roberta dreamed: London, balls, love, marriage…
“But Papa,” she would argue with him at supper, “you don’t wish me to live with you my whole life, do you?”
“I would love that!” he would say, beaming at her. “Who else will catalog my poetry, if not you, my dear? And your criticism, though occasionally harsh, has done much to improve my art. Much! Much! The future will preserve a warm place for you as the muse of the Marquess of Wharton and Malmesbury.”
“Papa,” she would say (for variations on this theme had recurred for years), “I don’t want to appear in history books as your muse, and I dislike cataloging poetry.” Sometimes she would add that she didn’t like critiquing poetry, either, but that depended on how recently she had torn apart one of his new poems.
At this, the marquess’s face would fall into tragic lines, and he would begin to mutter about the serpent’s tooth that was his only child. And if she begged a new gown, he never said no, but he would only pay for Mrs. Parthnell in the village. “If we don’t employ her, child, who will?” One of Mrs. Parthnell’s peculiarities was that she refused to line a sleeve in anything but white cotton duck, and due to sewing problems she routinely encountered, the white generally showed.
Even so, the faces of Jemma’s French maids were almost comical in their dismay when they beheld Roberta. Her gown had once been styled à la française, but Mrs. Parthnell had cut out the floating back pleats and used tapes to draw up the sides around into a clumsy polonaise instead. When Roberta objected to the way the waist bunched as it encountered the new bustle, Mrs. Parthnell cut out the bodice and replaced it with one of melon-colored cotton.
Apparently, Roberta’s sense that melon-colored cotton and burgundy silk were not a perfect match was correct, if the rather piercing screams of the French seamstresses could be taken as evidence.
Two seconds later she was stripped to her chemise and Mrs. Parthnell’s gown was thrown in the corner. “For the beggars,” Jemma’s femme de chambre, Brigitte, had explained. “None of us could wear such a thing.”
There was a cheerful little chorus of French agreements from Jemma’s other two maids. Formal gown after gown was brought out, discussed at length, and ceremoniously carried back to Jemma’s dressing room, which Roberta could only imagine as crammed with satins and silks.
Brigitte had explicit directions from the duchess herself. “She must look like a young lady of the utmost innocence,” she dictated. After a half hour or so of gowns trundling from the dressing room to Roberta’s chamber, it became clear that very few of Jemma’s gowns were designed to achieve an innocent air.
The few that were tried on Roberta quickly lost their claims to innocence, though Roberta thought they were exquisite. Even catching a glimpse of herself wearing one of Jemma’s dazzling French gowns made her heart sing. She didn’t look like a drab country mouse anymore: she looked beautiful. Visions of the Duke
of Villiers on his knees spun dizzyingly through her mind.
“You are too generous in the front,” Brigitte stated, dispelling that dream.
Roberta peered down at her chest. She had nothing compared to the naked centerpiece, after all.
“Is excellent!” Brigitte said hurriedly. “The men, they are most fond of bosoms. Many bosoms!”
Since Brigitte likely didn’t mean that men preferred women with more than two breasts, Roberta took this as a compliment. Unfortunately, her “many bosoms” made many of Jemma’s gowns unacceptable. She overflowed the bodices in a fashion that Brigitte kept declaring sensuelle, rather than innocente.
Suddenly Brigitte clapped her hands. “The white silk moiré!” she announced.
There was a little flurry of conversation. One maid ventured the fact that Jemma had labeled the gown ennuyeuse. “Boring,” Brigitte announced, “is just what is needed.”
“Oh, but—” Roberta said unhappily. This was ignored, as had been every other comment she ventured to make.
It certainly was a lovely dress, embroidered with tiny sprays of flowers that looked as if they’d been scattered by the wind. It showed rather less of her breasts than the others, because the neckline was a V, and trimmed with a small ruffle of white lace. The sleeves were tight and ended in a gorgeous frill. It was exquisite, but Roberta thought that Jemma was right. It was boring.
She had no say in the matter; all the other dresses, luscious in deep crimson and striped green, were whisked away, and Brigitte got down to the serious business of altering the white gown to fit.
“You will look like a fairy princess at the ball,” Brigitte said with great satisfaction. “All the princes will bow at your feet.”
It seemed to Roberta that Villiers was not the sort to bow at the feet of an innocent fairy princess, but how could she complain? He wouldn’t genuflect at the feet of the fleshy crocodile dressed in gold paint either; she was certain of that. She would have to study him closely in order to decide precisely how to pitch her courtship.
By the time Roberta made it out of her bedchamber it was late in the afternoon. Her father’s house was large, but Beaumont House was far larger. Within the turn of a corridor, she was lost.