“Nonsense. I’ve told you many times, as has Griselda, that men are very fond of figures like ours,” Annabel said. “Griselda! Wake up and tell Josie how delicious your figure is. And mine, for that matter.”
“The three of us do not have the same figure,” Josie said. “Your figure curves in and out, Annabel. Mine just flounders about.”
Griselda looked up. “This book is incredible. I am almost certain I know who Hellgate is.”
“Your brother?” Imogen asked idly. All of London was reading Hellgate’s memoirs—and most of London had decided that Hellgate was really the Earl of Mayne.
“I don’t think so,” Griselda said, having clearly given the matter serious thought. “I’m only a third of the way through, but I don’t recognize a single woman whom Mayne has courted.”
“Courted is not exactly the word for his interactions with women, is it?” Josie remarked.
“One needn’t be exact about such things,” Griselda said, unruffled by this slur on her brother’s character. “We all know that Mayne is not a saint. But although the writer is extremely clever, I don’t recognize the women.”
“Is it true that Mayne is in love?” Annabel asked. “I can hardly believe it. Remember when we first met him, the night we arrived at Rafe’s estate?”
“You staked him out as your property,” Tess said, smiling.
“Well, then you engaged yourself to him at the first opportunity,” Annabel retorted. “There was no respect for my prior claim.”
“One might say that almost all the Essex sisters tried to claim him in one way or another,” Imogen said, giggling.
“Least said about your efforts the better,” Tess put in.
“Well, there was nothing illicit between Mayne and myself,” Imogen said. “’Tis a tale quickly told. After sleeping with half the women in London, he refused to bed me, and that without a second thought.”
“My brother is a man of honor,” Griselda said. She raised her hand at the hoots of laughter around the table. “I know, I know…his reputation is not the best. But he has never deliberately injured anyone’s feelings, nor taken advantage of a woman in a vulnerable position. And you, Imogen, were in a vulnerable state of mind.”
“There’s always the possibility that he is simply burnt to the socket,” Josie said. “That’s what makes me think that Hellgate is Mayne. Yes, perhaps he has a vivid reputation, but it’s all due to the past. Your brother hasn’t had an affaire in years, Griselda.”
“Two years,” she said with dignity.
“You see? Apparently Hellgate talks of repentance, and I expect Mayne is indulging in the same sort of thinking. I wish you’d let me read the book, Griselda. I am certainly old enough.”
“I beg to differ,” Griselda stated, adding: “Mayne is in love, and we should allow his peccadillos to rest in the past.” She opened her book and began reading it again.
Annabel was frowning to herself and rocking Samuel. “Griselda’s right. While it’s vexing that Mayne somehow managed to slip by all four of us and marry a stranger—and I do wish to hear all about his exquisite Frenchwoman—the important person is you, Josie.”
Josie almost jested about refusing to marry if she couldn’t have Mayne, but she choked it off. Spinsterhood was too real a possibility to be spoken out loud.
“It’s all a matter of dressing,” Annabel announced. “You must go to that wonderful woman of Griselda’s.”
“I already have an entire new wardrobe, thanks to Rafe.”
“I took her to my modiste, Madame Badeau,” Imogen said a bit doubtfully, “but—”
“She gave me a marvelous corset,” Josie said. “At least when I’m wearing it I don’t feel as if I’m swelling in all directions like an unmoored balloon.”
“I don’t like that corset,” Tess said flatly.
“Unfortunately, neither do I,” Imogen said.
“Well, I’m not giving it up,” Josie said. “I can almost wear Imogen’s gowns when I’m in it; can you imagine, Annabel? If the ton laughs at me now, imagine what they would say if I wasn’t wearing the corset.” That’s how she thought of it: The Corset.
“What’s so miraculous about this particular corset?” Annabel asked. Samuel had woken up and was having a late night snack.
Josie looked away. It was bad enough that she, Josie, was saddled with breasts that she privately thought were far too large: like melons when oranges were the appropriate size. But Annabel had no compunction at all about feeding Samuel in front of them all, and her breasts were even larger.
“It’s a contraption made of whalebone and lord knows what else,” Tess told Annabel. “It goes from Josie’s collarbone all the way past her bottom.”
“How on earth do you sit down?” Annabel asked.
“It’s miraculously designed,” Josie told her. “There are let-in seams around the hips.”
“Is it comfortable?”
“Well, not particularly,” Josie said. “But ton parties are not precisely comfortable at the best of times, are they? I find them invariably tedious. I can’t dance well at all, and that seems to be the only pleasure one might take in them.”
“You danced more gracefully before you began wearing that object,” Tess pointed out.
Josie ignored her. “Madame Badeau designed a number of gowns that fit perfectly over the corset.”
“That’s just it,” Tess said, “they fit the corset, not you.”
“I like it,” Josie snapped. “And since I wouldn’t be caught at a ball without it on, you might as well stop insulting me.”
“We’re not insulting you,” Imogen said. “We just think you might be more comfortable with another sort of undergarment.”
“Never,” Josie said.
Griselda shut the book again. “I simply cannot imagine how Hellgate had time for anything other than dalliance. Why, I’m only on the seventh chapter and his behavior is beyond scandalous.”
“I think the true wonder is that Hellgate wasn’t compromised and forced into marriage,” Josie said. “Daisy Peckery’s mother allowed her to read it, and Daisy said that Hellgate bedded any number of young, unmarried women.”
“Another reason why a similarity between my brother and Hellgate should be dismissed at once,” Griselda pointed out. “Mayne has only slept with married women.”
“A wise decision on his part,” Josie said. “From the reading I’ve done, together with my observations of the ton in the last month, I would say that any man engaging in indelicate behavior around a young, unmarried woman is extremely imprudent. All sorts of marriages result from the most innocent, if foolish, kinds of dalliance.”
“I can attest to that,” Annabel put in. She had married her husband after a scandal broke in a gossip column.
“In fact,” Josie added, “by my estimation a woman who does not have a solid offer would be extremely foolish not to engage in a measured amount of imprudent behavior.”
Suddenly she realized they were all looking at her.
“No one has made the slightest approach to me,” she pointed out. “My remarks were intended to be purely theoretical.”
“I was remarkably fortunate to find myself paired with Ewan,” Annabel pointed out, frowning at Josie. “Other young women have not been so contented with a choice made rashly and under difficult circumstances.”
“I understand that,” Josie said. But inside she felt all the frustration of a theorist who has worked out a brilliant theory—and been given no material on which to practice. She could hardly create a scandal when men wouldn’t go anywhere near the Scottish Sausage.
And yet even sausages had to get married. More and more, she thought that she would have to obtain a husband in a less-than-honorable fashion. Of course, she didn’t mean to share that salient fact with her sisters.
Annabel turned to Tess and Imogen. “So how long have you two been aware that Josie was planning to create a scandal?”
Imogen popped a grape in her mouth. “I should t
hink she came up with the idea about a year ago, didn’t you, Josie?”
“Actually,” Tess corrected her, “I would place Josie’s resolution about the time she first began reading all those novels printed by the Minerva Press.”
Josie gave a mental shrug. So her plans were known to the family—and now to Griselda, who was looking up from her book, rather startled.
“There is a trifling detail that you have overlooked,” Josie said.
“And what may that be?” Annabel asked.
“It takes two to create a scandal, and since no man will even dance with me, I think the Essex family is likely to be free from the taint of a contrived marriage.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“I should amend that: yet another contrived marriage,” Josie said. And then ducked when Imogen threw a grape at her.
2
From The Earl of Hellgate,
Chapter the First
Perhaps others who embark on a life marked by Sins of the Flesh realize in their infancy that they are born to a life of notorious liaisons. I, Dear Reader, was raised in blissful ignorance of my future infamy.
In fact, it wasn’t until the tender years of my youth, when I in all my innocence visited the Court of St. James—oh, I loathe to set down the words—that I met a duchess. The episode of the green stockings is known to some, but I can tell you now that…
St. Paul’s Cathedral
London
It was a serious wedding, plump with pomp and circumstance. Imogen made her way up the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral to be greeted by no less than the Bishop of London. She was exquisitely gowned in cloth of gold; the groom committed the forgivable solecism of taking her hands during the ceremony, and smiling down at her in such a way that tears came to the eyes of many an unhappily married soul. And even some of the happily married ones.
Garret Langham, the Earl of Mayne, watched his closest friend, Raphael Jourdain, Duke of Holbrook, stand at the altar with a sense of deep satisfaction. The day was when he might have scoffed at a man with Rafe’s look of abject adoration. Rafe resembled nothing so much as a lovesick cow, or rather bull. Which was just fine, because Mayne felt the same way. Before long, it would be he standing before the bishop, swearing to love and to cherish, as Rafe was doing.
His heart quickened at the thought, and he could almost feel his own features taking on a look of imbecilic adoration. After all, Sylvie was his. He’d never understood that before; never guessed how powerful it was to know that the woman you most love in the world has agreed to be yours.
He glanced at his left. She was standing beside him. Sylvie de la Broderie. Even her name sent a shiver of delight up his spine. She was dressed, as always, with exquisite correctness. Her gown was a rosy pale pink that somehow didn’t swear with her pale red-gold hair. He could just glimpse her elegant retroussé nose. Little curls fell down her neck from under her jaunty, unmistakably French bonnet, adorned with a flutter of tiny ribbons. Like her bonnet, Sylvie was unmistakably French.
Mayne’s mother was French, and he loved nothing more than speaking the language. It all felt right: he had finally, at long last, found a woman whom he adored, and she was French.
“It’s providence,” Rafe had said lazily the night before. They were toasting his wedding with water, since Rafe didn’t drink.
“And my sister adores her,” Mayne had said, unable to stop categorizing Sylvie’s perfections.
“Good old Grissie. You must find your sister a husband now that you’re contemplating domestic bliss. You’re so unnaturally cheerful that I can hardly stand your presence.”
“Well, you won’t have to bear me for long,” Mayne had retorted. “Wedding trip, eh? There’s a newfangled notion.”
“Are you saying that you won’t wish to take your Sylvie to a remote location, preferably on the slowest boat available?”
An image flashed into Mayne’s mind, of himself peeling back Sylvie’s long gloves, revealing a sweet delicate wrist and…
Rafe had laughed at his silence.
Mayne knew that he was dangerously smitten. All he had to do was glance down at his fiancée’s gloved fingers to feel a stirring in his groin. The very thought of peeling off those gloves made him more fraught with passion than he’d been in years. Likely, he thought with a flash of amused contempt for himself, since bedding his fifth or sixth matron.
Yet Sylvie was different from all those women he had bedded, from the first to the thirtieth. She was even different from the only other woman he’d truly loved, the one matron who had not given in to his skilled seductions, Helene, the Countess Godwin. The countess was seated a few rows behind him. They rarely spoke to each other, and her happiness with her husband shone from her eyes. Mayne’s bitter disappointment (though he was ashamed to admit it) had hampered him from the kind of cheerful relationship he enjoyed with most of the society ladies whom he’d bedded.
Of course, that life was over. Sylvie was a virgin, innocent in the ways of the body, even if she had a practical French approach to the bedroom. In fact, she’d told him in her enchanting French accent that she doubted she would make him happy in the bedroom. A little smile curled Mayne’s mouth. Those were naive words, though one would never think to use that term of his sophisticated, sleek fiancée.
Now he glanced down at the curve of Sylvie’s cheek, her pointed chin, the slender fingers holding her prayerbook, and was struck by a wave of gladness. Of course she would make him happy; she had such small acquaintance with desire that she knew nothing of it. And for some dark reason, her innocence made him happy.
Women had always fallen into his arms with dismaying ease, turning their lips up to his before he asked for the privilege, their eyes following him about the room before he knew their names. But Sylvie had to be introduced to him three times; she kept forgetting his name. They had never shared a passionate kiss, even after becoming affianced: she had a strong sense of propriety. It wasn’t as if he wished to kiss her into silence.
Well, he did wish it.
But no one would want Sylvie to be silent: her flow of enchanting, laughing conversation enlivened every minute. In fact, once he finally had her in bed with him, and married, he could imagine her ravishing commentary on the night when he showed her, slowly and tenderly, all the delights that a woman experiences in the arms of a man.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” he had said to Rafe the night before. “Here I am, with my reputation—”
“Spawned by the devil to cuckold unwitting husbands,” Rafe had put in.
“With my reputation,” Mayne had repeated, “and Sylvie de la Broderie agrees to marry me.”
“A chaste goddess, by anyone’s terms. Though I never knew a woman’s reputation was important to you.”
Mayne suddenly remembered that Rafe’s affianced bride, Imogen, hardly enjoyed the reputation of a snowy dove. “It isn’t. But I find some cynical enjoyment in the fact that Sylvie’s reputation is so irreproachable.”
“I suspect that everyone in London is sharing your bewilderment. Or they would be if you weren’t so damned good-looking.”
“Sylvie is not a woman to be swayed by something so unimportant.”
“Thank God, Imogen isn’t either,” Rafe had said, making a face.
“You’re not so bad. Now you’ve lost your gut.”
“I’ll never be a fashion plate. Whereas you always have that look about you, Mayne. I expect that’s why she took you. You look French.”
Mayne had opened his mouth to protest—surely Sylvie loved him for his character, for his tenderness toward her, for his passion, always held in check—but caught back the words. Sylvie was his. He had gone down on one knee and offered her an emerald ring that had been in his family for generations…and she had said yes.
Yes!
He didn’t need to boast, even to his closest friend, about the affection that Sylvie felt for him. Such emotions were best left unvoiced. Sylvie was an aristocrat, from the tips of her delicate glov
ed fingers to the jeweled heel of her slippers. The daughter of the Marquis de Caribas, who luckily escaped with his estates intact from the carnage in Paris, would never insult herself or him by naive murmurings. He loved her, and she knew it.
She accepted it, with a tiny bend of her head, as her due.
And he…he was almost afraid that what he felt went beyond love. He trembled just to be standing next to her, bored his friends by speaking about her whenever she wasn’t near, found himself watching her whenever she was.
As if she felt his eyes on her face, she looked up and smiled. Her face was a perfect triangle, from her delicately flaring eyebrows to her high cheekbones. There was nothing superfluous about her, nothing loud, nothing inelegant. “Stop looking like that!” she whispered to him in her enchanting French lisp. “You make me feel quite odd.”
Mayne grinned at her. “Good,” he said, bending over so that he breathed it into her ear. “I want you to feel quite odd.”
She gave him a reproving little frown and turned back to her prayer book.
At the altar, Imogen looked up at Rafe and said clearly, “I do.” Relief was clear in every lineament of Rafe’s body. He bent his head and kissed his bride, ignoring the bishop, who was still reading out of his prayer book. Mayne grinned. That was just like Rafe; up to the very last moment he was worried that Imogen would realize what a poor bargain he was.
“Why should she marry me?” he had demanded, the night before his wedding. “God, I want a drink at times like these.”
“Well, you can’t have one,” Mayne said. “Normally, I would assume that she’s blind and desperate. But since she shows no signs of infirmity, and she’s clearly not desperate, being one of the richest young widows in the ton, not to mention beautiful, I can only conclude that she’s lost her wits.”
Rafe ignored him. “She says—” the raw emotion in his eyes caught Mayne by surprise—“she says she loves me.”
“As I said, she’s cracked,” Mayne said, instinctively trying to lighten the conversation. “Perhaps she’s taking you for the title. She wants to be a duchess. In fact,” he said, warming to the task, “I’m fairly sure that Imogen said as much to me. Wasn’t I supposed to marry her at one time? Of course, a duchess is better than a countess.”