“There’s really not much more to it,” Annabel said. She was on the verge of giggling again.
“Don’t ignore me,” Josie hissed. “I’m not a baby anymore. I’m about to marry—no! I just married a man who has slept with a great many women, and I need—I need—” She couldn’t put into words what she needed. Some trick, some stratagem to make him think that she was a better bed partner than all those others.
Tess smiled at her, and there wasn’t mockery in her eyes. “Just enjoy yourself.”
“That’s right. Enjoy yourself,” Annabel affirmed.
Josie had never felt more rage toward her sisters in her life. “I don’t want to seem presumptuous, but I’d like you to be specific.”
“There are some things that can’t be spelled out,” Annabel said.
Josie turned on her. “Spell them out anyway.”
“Use your imagination,” Tess suggested.
“My imagination,” Josie said, stunned by the enormity of what she couldn’t visualize. “Where does imagination come into it? As I understand it, the man climbs on top of his wife and—and does what he has to do. I don’t see any room for imagination. From what I’ve heard, it’s painful. Mrs. Fiddle, in the village, said there might be blood.” She made a face.
“Oh, as for that first time,” Tess said, “don’t worry about it. I hardly felt it.”
“I was exactly the same,” Annabel said, nodding. “A tiny pinch, and no blood. I think Mrs. Fiddle must have been rather hysterical on the subject.”
“You still don’t understand. You don’t seem to grasp what I’m facing. Mayne has slept with the most beautiful and seductive women in London. And I am—what I am. I need some sort of special technique.” She felt desperate. “Annabel, you must know something!”
Annabel frowned at her. “There aren’t any special techniques. That is, perhaps there are, but they’re something you have to discover on your own. Between you and Mayne.”
“Don’t be fearful,” Tess put in.
“That’s wonderful,” Josie snapped. “I’m going into this situation blind, and you tell me not to be fearful. Tell me something helpful!”
“The most helpful thing I can tell you is to allow your husband to give you pleasure,” Annabel said. “I never understood that before I was married. What will drive him mad with pleasure is if you are overcome by the same emotion.”
Josie sat down and tried to think about that one. Whether that was enough to keep Mayne at her side when he had fled the beds of so many other women, doubtless all of whom were overcome by pleasure.
“I wish Griselda was here,” Annabel said. “She would know the precise details, but I do think that Mayne has never managed to keep a relationship with a woman going above a week. Or is it two? Tess, do you know?”
Tess made a face. She hated this sort of gossip as much as Annabel loved it. “My understanding is that it has been a question of a week, if that.”
“So, Josie,” Annabel said. “All you have to do is keep your husband in your bed over a week, and you’ve won the battle.”
Josie thought about that.
Annabel came and perched on one side of her armchair. “I think that you and Mayne will be very happy together,” she said, smiling.
Tess sat on the other side and stroked Josie’s hair. “Mayne has just won the greatest Ascot of them all.”
Josie managed a wobbly smile. They seemed to have forgotten that Mayne was in love with another woman. She didn’t have the heart to bring Sylvie up. It was one thing to contemplate a victory, if one could call it that, over all of Mayne’s married lovers. It was another to imagine ever dislodging his love of Sylvie from his heart.
“I’m going to be the best wife he ever has,” she said in a little stony voice.
“Of course you will be! And luckily, you’re his first and only wife, so you needn’t even worry about competition,” Annabel said.
“I’ll have to be—” she gulped “—well, nice.”
“You are nice,” Tess offered.
But Josie wasn’t interested in compliments. “Not most of the time,” she said, looking at her sisters. “I’m a bad-tempered beast, just as you’ve called me so many times. I really am. I’m horrible.” Her face started to crumple and she caught herself. “You don’t understand just how much I hate all those people who called me a sausage. Or who laughed along with it. In fact, sometimes I think I hate most of the population of London.”
“You might wish to disguise that a bit,” Annabel suggested.
“I’m going to be much, much nicer than I really am,” Josie stated. “Sweet. Honey-sweet, like all the heroines in my books.”
Tess was looking doubtful.
“Don’t you think I can do it?”
“Of course you can do anything you wish—”
There was a knock at the door. It was Lucius, who put his head around the door and said, “My lord bishop is begging leave to return to his house.”
Josie rose to her feet, feeling the comforting presence of her sisters at her sides. “I am ready,” she said.
It seemed that Lucius was accompanying the bishop to his house, and that meant—that meant she and Mayne were free to leave. To go to his house.
“I have no nightgown,” Josie whispered to Tess in a moment of pure terror.
“My maid already gave a bag to the footman,” Annabel said, giving her a warm hug. “I’m so happy for you, darling.”
Tess came too, and the three of them stood in a wreath of arms and kisses. “I just wish that Imogen were here.”
“I love you both,” Josie said a bit damply.
“You’ll be all right,” Annabel whispered in her ear. “Just—”
“I know!” Josie said, panicked that Mayne would hear her sister’s advice about pleasure and the rest of it. Or worse, advice about her temper. Because there he was at her elbow: the man who had, according to gossip, slept with virtually every beautiful woman in London—and left them a week later. And she thought to keep him as a husband?
He didn’t look like a seducer at the moment. There was something wild and dark in his eyes, a note of anguish that Josie didn’t like. “I’m all right,” she said to him, before she even knew she spoke.
“Shall we…” He hesitated.
How could she go with him? She couldn’t! But before she even knew what was happening, she was being wrapped in a pelisse. She couldn’t even find her voice when they were in the carriage, so they sat in silence for at least five minutes while she sank deeper into a morass of embarrassment. If she told him the truth, what would he do? What would he say? He only—
“I just want you to know, Josie, that I would never force you into any sort of intimate experience that you are not prepared for,” Mayne said suddenly.
She could hardly see his face, but then he leaned forward and the light from the small lamp hanging at the side of the carriage fell on him. He looked so earnest, kind, and resolute that her heart dropped into her toes. She didn’t deserve him.
“I cannot imagine a more terrible experience for a woman.” He took her hand, and even though Josie knew she should be writhing in guilt, her heart started beating more quickly. “I’ll do anything I can for you. And if there’s a child—”
She shook her head.
“You can’t know.” He said it so gently that her heart turned over and she pulled her hand away.
“Garret—” But somehow her confession died on her lips. She wanted to be married to him. At the base of it all, there was nowhere on earth she wanted to be other than in this carriage, able to call him by his first name. And if she was going to go to hell for the blackness of her crimes…He was so beautiful, with his straight brows and serious eyes.
“Of course neither of us have been in this situation before. Our marriage may have begun in a bungling fashion, Josie, but it will be as serious to me as if we’d wed in Westminster Abbey. I know I have a poor reputation, but I said farewell to that life a while ago. I will not
betray you.”
“No,” she said. “Nor I you.”
“I shall guard you a bit more fiercely than I did at the racetrack,” he said, turning her hand over. “I suspect it will take some time for you to countenance the idea of intimacies. I want you to feel at ease. We can wait for those matters as long as you wish. A year even.”
Josie swallowed. The only thing that came to mind was a forlorn line of Desdemona’s when Othello was sent off to war: the rites for which I married him are bereft me. A fancy way of asking the governor not to send her husband off to war before they consummated their marriage. But how could she say such a thing? With Mayne thinking that she was devastated by Thurman’s disgusting advances?
Of course, if she were a more ladylike person, she probably would be distraught. After all, Thurman certainly made an attempt to grab her breast, the loathsome muckworm.
Something must have showed in her face, because all of a sudden Mayne was sitting beside her.
“Who was it?” he asked. His voice echoed queerly around the carriage.
Josie’s breathing missed a hitch. How could she tell him? He’d probably murder poor Thurman, and all the man did—albeit with a singular lack of grace—was kiss her. Well, maul her. Still…
She was quite aware that if the upshot of being mauled by Thurman was being married to Mayne, she would endure it all over again. “I took care of it myself,” she said.
“What?”
Josie gulped. There was no help for it; she’d have to tell the truth. “We were behind the stables.”
He wrapped an arm around her and it felt so good that she let herself lean into his shoulder.
“Why were you behind the stables?”
“I didn’t really notice where we were going,” Josie confessed. She could hardly say that she had been tired of watching Sylvie’s darling little turban and her slim little figure and the way she clung to Mayne’s arm.
His arm tightened. “So he took you behind the stables and—”
“He started to kiss me and—things of that nature. My dress ripped.” He made a muffled sound and Josie said: “I wrenched free at one point and he came back toward me, and there was a pile of manure.” She stopped.
“A pile of manure?”
“And a shovel.”
“Oh, my God,” Mayne said.
“I slung it at him,” Josie told Mayne’s coat.
“Where’d you hit him?”
“In the face.”
There was a moment of silence. “The man still needs to die, but I’m proud of you. Now who was it?”
How could she answer that? She looked at him instead. They hadn’t been so close to each other since the time he kissed her in his turreted room. Her heart was going so quickly she could feel it against her gown. She looked at him, at the eyelashes that were longer than hers, and his eyes, and the beautiful, weary look of him. A wave of heat swept over her body. Heat and hunger.
She swallowed and felt the ripple in her throat. In fact, she felt every inch of her skin, as if it belonged to someone else.
There was something in his eyes. It was as if the sound of the horses had died away and they were both holding their breaths, or perhaps only she was…
“Josie,” he said, after what seemed like a century.
“Yes?” She whispered it.
“You’re my wife.” He looked almost comically surprised.
Josie could tell that this was the moment to make a clean breast of it. Not that it was really her fault that he had decided she was ravished, but she hadn’t clarified the matter. “Do you mind being married?” she asked, losing her courage.
“I hardly know.” The carriage was drawing to a halt. “Do you like being married? To me?”
“Yes,” she said. And she let it all sweep over her again, the masculine, warm smell of him, the beauty of him, the broad shoulder she leaned against, his blatantly seductive, beautiful eyes. “I do like being married to you,” she said, rather shakily.
His eyes searched hers, just long enough so that she quivered with anxiety. Then the door swept open and the step was out. She moved down into the crisp night air, and she wasn’t Josephine Essex any longer.
She was the Countess of Mayne.
32
From The Earl of Hellgate,
Chapter the Twenty-third
Dear Reader, have you guessed that I am not designed for the state of matrimony? My poor darling Mustardseed, to name her after another of Shakespeare’s fairies. I shall not say much of her, for our life together was short, and sometimes sweet.
Thurman was not having a good night. He had arrived home in a malodorous state and grumblingly washed himself up. He consoled himself with snapping at his man and sending his dinner back twice to be remade.
It wasn’t until the middle of the night that he sat bolt upright in his bed with an oath on his lips.
He’d suddenly realized that he might find himself at the cold end of a long sword on the morrow. He stared at the gray light filtering into his room, his fingers gripping the coverlet.
“Bloody hell,” he whispered out loud. If the Sausage went back to all those brothers-in-law of hers and told them his name, he’d be married to a fat Scottish woman before he turned around. He threw off the covers and tottered out of bed, his bare legs cold under the skirt of his nightdress.
“No,” he groaned. “No, no, no.”
His father wouldn’t support him, not in this. What had he been thinking? He got a little carried away when she fought him. It was her fault, really. If she had just recognized what an honor he was paying her by deigning to kiss her, none of this would have happened.
The last sight he had of her, her dress torn and her hair falling about her shoulders, flashed before his eyes. No one would believe him when he said he didn’t tear her dress. Because he didn’t. He didn’t even know how that happened. All he did was get a handful of her breasts, just to see if they were as large as they seemed.
He couldn’t stop a little grin at that. You can’t keep a Thurman down, not when he’s got a hot spell on him. We’re all the same, and ’ware the village maidens when—
But she wasn’t a village maiden, that was the problem. And he—he almost felt like retching at the thought—he might find himself married to that great cow of a woman. Even the thought of how his brothers would laugh at him made him feel like killing someone.
Finally he splashed cold water on his face. He managed to dress himself only after his man, Cooper, asked twice, and after he realized that he was foolishly thinking that her brothers-in-law wouldn’t attack an unclothed man.
By ten in the morning he had walked a circle in his study a hundred times. Of course she would tell them. She would leap at the chance to marry the eldest son of a squire. Damn, damn, damn.
She did have a dowry, he kept telling himself. And her breasts weren’t so bad. In fact, a woman in the dark is the same as any other woman. He could—
He couldn’t! He wanted to howl at it. The idea that he—one of Darlington’s friends, his intimates—marrying a woman called the Scottish Sausage made his gorge rise.
It was almost a relief when Cooper appeared and announced a visitor. “Tell them to come in!” he snapped.
Cooper blinked. “It isn’t more than one. It’s a man called Harry Grone.”
Not a gentleman. Not a brother-in-law. Thurman nodded. Could he be some sort of intermissionary, a lawyer, perhaps?
He positioned himself in front of the fire, legs well apart. “What do you want, then?” he barked, the moment the door closed behind Cooper. He had to be aggressive and manly. He had decided to deny everything. It was worth a try.
But this was no lawyer to an earl. In fact…
“I’ve come to ask a small favor,” the man said. He was a dried-up old prune of a thing who looked as if he had few teeth and less wits. Thurman couldn’t stand old people. They smelled and pissed in their trousers.
“The answer is no.”
“I’m
prepared to pay magnificently for your generosity,” the man said. He drew out a bag of sovereigns.
Thurman could feel his heart slowing back to normal. His father kept him well-stocked with everything a young heir-about-town needed. “Get out of my house,” he snarled.
“And all I wanted was a bit of information from your family’s printing house. Just a wee bit of information. Wouldn’t take the young master more than a moment to find it out.”
The idiot didn’t think that he, Thurman, actually entered the premises of the printing press, did he?
“’Tis a powerfully expensive life,” the man crooned. “Perhaps you might use this small gift to pay a gambling debt…or a tailor’s bill?”
“I don’t gamble.” He started walking toward Grone. It would feel absolutely right to take this bounder apart, limb from limb. Grone was questioning his honor. He deserved to be beaten.
The man jumped back faster than Thurman could imagine a bald-pate could move. “I’ll leave my card,” he squeaked, throwing something on the table. “The offer is good, sir.” And he was gone before Thurman could grab him.
Thurman satisfied himself with picking up the entire table with the card on it and throwing it against the wall. It flew to pieces with a great splintering of wood. Bloody Hepplewhite furniture was made of toothpicks.
33
From The Earl of Hellgate,
Chapter the Twenty-third
She came to me on a Monday, and she died on Friday, in a most lamentable series of events. I like to think that she flew from my arms into God’s bosom, although in a less poetic vein, she ate a bad piece of eel pie and died soon after.
They were sitting around a scrubbed white table in Darlington’s little kitchen. “Have you ever eaten in a kitchen before?” he asked, handing her an apple he’d polished.
“Never.” Griselda was perched on a kitchen stool, hugging a bowl of cocoa.
“I have a kitchen maid and a cook,” he explained, “but they live in their own houses.”