They were ambling along, arguing as they went, their voices echoing off of the quiet woods around them.
“She’s a daughter of the house, you ass,” Josie heard. “A daughter of the house.” She strained to hear. Could they be talking about her? That was the same term that Ewan had used earlier.
“More like a sow of the house,” one of them said sullenly.
Josie’s heart dropped. They were definitely speaking of her. And by his sulky tone, that was the younger Crogan. It must be difficult to be the younger one when the estate wasn’t all that large, and the Crogans not exactly celebrated for fine management.
“I don’t give the devil’s hind leg if you think the girl is a pug-nosed piglet,” Crogan roared, his words coming clearly to Josie’s ears. “She may be bit round in the face, but a proper man likes a bit of meat on the bone.”
The younger Crogan muttered something Josie didn’t hear. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, pressed up against the tree, praying they wouldn’t glimpse her. Her fingers were gripping its rough surface so hard that she could feel every gnarly lump in the bark.
“Nay, and it’s not as if your own stomach isn’t a bit overpadded,” Crogan said. To her horror, it sounded as if they had stopped walking almost directly in front of her.
“She’s got three stone on me,” the younger Crogan said flatly. “I ain’t marrying a woman who might squash me in my sleep.”
“You’re a fool, that’s what you are. She may be robust, but she’s got a pretty look about her.”
“And a sharp tongue!”
“But she’s not ill shaped,” Crogan said.
His brother spat on the ground. “You might as well tell me to poke a lard barrel.”
I wouldn’t squash you, Josie thought. I’d kill you before we made it to the bed.
“She’s a bit on the chuffy side, perhaps,” Crogan conceded. “But God’s a-live man, where are you going to find a woman who comes along with a dowry like that? She’s got a horse from her father, guineas from those sisters of hers, and if she’s called a daughter of the Ardmore house, that brings into play the old agreements. It’s a handsome package, Young Crogan. You’d be cracked not to take it.”
Young Crogan muttered something that Josie couldn’t hear. Mostly, she could hear her own blood pounding in her veins.
“I don’t give a twat if you don’t want her,” Crogan roared again, his voice echoing down the empty road. “She’s a prime Scottish piglet, and I’d snuffle around her skirts any day. You should be grateful for a wife who will never cuckold you, and leave it at that, you featherheaded dunce. Now you either start courting that lass tomorrow, or you’re out on your puddinglike ass to sing for your supper.”
The younger Crogan used a few words that Josie had never heard before. But she heard the word “hog” clear as a bell.
“Shut your trap,” his brother advised. “You keep the woman happy by feeding her enough bacon, and she’ll give you no trouble. You can do whatever you want in your spare time, and you’ll never have to worry about whether your children are your own. What could be better?”
Finally, he started to walk off again, his boots scuffing in the dirt and by the sound of it young Crogan followed.
Josie stayed there, fixed to the oak as if she’d been molded to the bark. The last thing she heard as they rounded the curve was a final outburst from Crogan: “You beef-witted fool!”
12
Of the Vulgarity of Greek Plays
Two weeks after his final drink Rafe was as dry as a bone, and the house felt like a rabbit hutch in April. Miss Pythian-Adams was expected in time for supper. The whole house resounded with the sound of pounding from the location of the theater. The ballroom was full of women sewing red velvet curtains. The great salon was full of spindly-legged chairs being re-covered and repaired. Never mind the fact that the duke felt more like the inhabitant of a tomb than a hutch.
“Everyone wishes to come to our performance,” Griselda said, waving another acceptance at him. “I’m receiving letters from people whom I haven’t invited. Although I can hardly attribute it to my status. Your Mr. Spenser is quite the talk of the day. Did you know that he is considered to have been the most brilliant man to have taken a degree at Cambridge in years?”
“Humph,” Rafe said. He was having trouble drumming up enthusiasm, which had something to do with the incessant, pounding headache he was trying to learn to live with.
“Quite unusual,” Griselda said, with unnecessary emphasis, to Rafe’s mind.
“Will your friends draw lots to see who marries him?” Rafe drawled, trying to achieve a tone beyond utter disinterest.
“Absolutely not!”
“Why not?” Rafe said, leaning his head against the back of the settee.
“You may be acting with the best of motives in welcoming your brother, but greater society will not be so unforgiving. He does have an awkward background.”
At that moment the man himself strolled into the sitting room. In the crook of his arm was a red-haired urchin with a toothless grin.
Rafe looked at his brother blearily. To tell the truth, he felt worse sober than he had on the most terrible of mornings. For one thing, back when he could have a whiskey or two, he used to sleep at night. He never slept anymore. And he used to eat a decent first course or two. Now his stomach churned at the thought of food. Yesterday he’d managed to choke down a few bites of bread.
The only thing standing between him and a comfortable haze of brandy was the very baby waving a rattle at him. Well, that baby, and his brother. And the scorn that Imogen would undoubtedly heap on his head. And perhaps at the very bottom of all that, the wish to show the world that he could do it.
In the meantime, he was pretending that everything was just fine. He sat at meals although he didn’t eat, and he retired into his room at night to contemplate sleeping. He even carried on a conversation now and then.
“Where’s her nanny?” he asked Gabe, making an attempt at discourse. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember his niece’s name at the moment.
“I released the woman from her employment,” his brother replied. “She was incompetent and unkind.”
“All right,” Rafe said. And then he realized that perhaps further comment was called for. “What’d she do?”
“I found Mary crying again,” Gabe said.
Rafe knew his brain was exceedingly slow these days, but there was something misguided about Gabe’s household arrangements. “Then who,” he said, painstakingly shaping the words between the hammerblows assaulting his brain, “is going to care for the child?”
“She still has a wet nurse,” Gabe said. “And one of the upstairs housemaids is quite good with children.”
“Oh.” The very thought of a wet-nurse was distasteful and made Rafe’s stomach reel, so he gave up on the conversation.
Brinkley opened the door with a crash that could have been heard in the next country. “Lady Ancilla Pythian-Adams,” he announced. “And Miss Pythian-Adams.”
Rafe lurched to his feet. Miss Pythian-Adams’s mother, Lady Ancilla, had the air of being a woman who knew she was still beautiful and was, therefore, accepting middle age with amusement. You could tell with one glance that she took her own importance with a grain of salt and was conventional without being tedious.
Her daughter was altogether a different sort. Rafe remembered her quite clearly as a young woman who was not tedious—but certainly not conventional. It would be an extraordinarily foolish man who didn’t look past Miss Pythian-Adams’s delicate features and Cupid’s bow mouth and realize that she was a true eccentric.
Of course, Griselda had rushed toward Lady Ancilla, so Rafe bowed to Miss Pythian-Adams. Luckily his head didn’t topple to the floor and roll away.
Just then Imogen walked into the room. That was going to be a slightly tricky encounter: former fiancée meets widow. Miss Pythian-Adams was all very well in her own way, but there wasn’t a woman in the ton who could hol
d a candle to Imogen. She had her hair piled on top of her head with just a few curls hanging down over her shoulders. Rafe wouldn’t have known exactly how to describe what she was wearing—some sort of morning gown, but it looked different on her than on other women. His ward could wear a potato sack and make it look like a silk gown.
The women were curtsying to each other just as if they hadn’t, once, shared a man called Draven Maitland, a man whom Imogen lured away, leaving Gillian Pythian-Adams without a husband.
Rafe felt sweat break out on his brow just watching them. How did people get through their days without drinking? And what was the point?
Gabriel Spenser had learned as a boy that there were many things in the world that he would want and that he could not have. Likely, every illegitimate child learned that lesson at his mother’s knee. Thankfully, he had never longed for food; the old Holbrook duke, in his stubborn and unlikely affection for Gabriel’s mother, had always provided for their material needs. But there were other things. From his earliest days he knew that the visits from the duke were events.
A messenger would arrive, announcing an impending visit, perhaps five days in advance. His mother’s eyes would shine. Soon the house would be shining too. It was years before he understood the implications of his mother’s preparation—the visits from the hairdresser, the new stockings, the flowers in her bedchamber.
He was six years old when Harry Hunks pointed out the obvious in the schoolyard. Gabe had promptly knocked Harry to the ground. He stood over him, knuckles stinging and his right knee bleeding, feeling rather triumphant because Harry had at least a stone’s weight on him. Then Harry looked up at him through a rapidly swelling right eye, and said: “I don’t care. Your mother’s no better than a chipper. My da said so.”
Gabe didn’t know what a chipper was, but he could guess.
“My ma says that her own family won’t have anything to do with her,” Harry added. “You don’t have a grandda.”
Gabe pulled Harry to his feet and slugged him so hard that he knocked out one of Harry’s front teeth.
But none of it made any difference. Harry might have been toothless, with a shrill voice, but his mother was the butcher’s wife and they were fast married. Gabe’s mother was beautiful and wellborn, the third daughter of a country squire, but she was a chipper. To Gabe’s mind, Harry’s lack of a front tooth was his own fault because it was pure stupidity to taunt him about his mother’s situation.
Before that, he had never really noticed that he didn’t seem to have any grandparents. He knew his mother was a squire’s daughter, although he never wondered where the squire was. Of course, he had known that his father was a duke who had another wife, but he hadn’t thought about the implications of that statement.
Not until Harry pointed it out.
Gabe formed his entire philosophy of life in one panting second in the dusty schoolyard. He could wish that his mother were married (and he did), but it wouldn’t make any difference. He took the schoolmaster’s whipping with stoic resignation because he deserved it. Not for beating Harry, but for fighting for something he could never have. That was stupid, as stupid as Harry losing a tooth over someone else’s mother. It was worse to be stupid than to be the son of a chipper. It was stupid to get into fights, and it was even stupider to want what you could never have.
He never fought over the subject again. Occasionally boys called his mother a light-frigate or worse, a doxy or a drab. He just looked at them and walked away. There was something unpleasant in his eye, even without his fists behind it. Generally the words dried in their mouths.
And Gabe accustomed himself to making instantaneous decisions. If there was something—or someone—he desired, he decided whether it was possible. If it was not possible, he didn’t spare it another thought. If it was possible, he fought for it tooth and nail, as long as he judged it an intelligent goal.
His philosophy held him in excellent stead until the Year of Our Lord 1817, on a morning in October, when he looked up and met the eyes of a certain Miss Pythian-Adams. It wasn’t merely longing that flooded his body; it was pure, unmitigated desire: for this ladylike, contained, intelligent, exquisite person. For her.
He shouldn’t spare her a glance.
He couldn’t help looking at her again and again.
It went against all his most deeply held principles. She was unattainable. He shouldn’t spare her a thought.
He would have to work on that one later.
For the meantime he settled on making himself as objectionable as possible. Because, after all, she undoubtedly shared the opinion of most gentlefolk, that irregular birth manifested itself in a disagreeable personality. And he had never felt more illegitimate in his life.
For her part, Gillian Pythian-Adams had just discovered that a simple theatrical party was in fact a serious production and that she was, by all accounts, the stage manager.
“None of us knows the faintest thing about these productions,” the Duke of Holbrook was saying. “We depend on you for everything.”
“Generally speaking, private theatricals are a quite private business,” Gillian pointed out. “Did you say that you wished to invite over one hundred people, Your Grace?”
Holbrook nodded. “At least.”
“Does that really sound like a private theatrical?” her mama asked.
The duke seemed to have a headache. He had covered his eyes with his hand and just mumbled something in reply.
“I quite agree,” her mother said cheerfully. “Let’s invite a mere fifty. Or—better yet—let’s just invite the village and leave it at that.”
“I’m afraid that this must be an altogether more public affair,” Mr. Spenser said with quiet authority.
Gillian narrowed her eyes. The man holding the baby was in charge, for some reason. “May I ask why?” she inquired.
“We have a fancy to it,” the duke said, his voice hollow. “My mother calculated that the theater could sit two hundred, if need be.”
Gillian suddenly remembered how taken she was by the idea of putting on a play in the Duchess of Holbrook’s famous little jewel box of a theater. “The first thing is to decide which play we would like to put on,” she said. She picked up a stack of books to her right. “I took the liberty of bringing a few plays with me.”
“Since you’re holding a volume of Sophocles,” the duke said, “I might as well tell you that my mother tried the Greek dramatists, but they failed on the stage. In fact, a few of them were viewed with true dislike.”
“There is something uncommonly vulgar about some Greek plays,” Gillian agreed.
The professor of divinity looked at her, and she felt herself flushing. “Ought one to enjoy tales such as Oedipus?” she inquired, feeling like a prude.
“The Bible has moments of great vulgarity,” he said, “and yet it retains its rightful place in the canon of reading material.”
“I would suggest George Etheridge,” Gillian said, not feeling up to a skirmish over vulgar moments in sacred texts. “The Man of Mode.”
“Petty stuff,” the professor said, his lip curling.
Gillian’s mouth tightened. “School for Scandal?”
“Baroque in its pettiness.”
“I am particularly fond of that play,” Gillian commented.
“I haven’t read either,” Lady Griselda said. “Should I? Are these plays humorous or of the serious genre?”
“Humorous,” Gillian said, at the same time that the professor said, “Trivial.”
“And what would you suggest?” Gillian demanded.
“I shall ransack Rafe’s library tonight,” Mr. Spenser answered, “and find an appropriate play. It’s not my field.”
“We could always try a Shakespeare play, though I do think they’re quite difficult for amateurs to do well,” Gillian offered.
“Shakespeare was excluded from the early collections of the Bodleian Library, and for good reason,” the professor remarked. “Dr. Johnson was the f
irst to note the extraordinary bawdiness of those plays. The comedies, in particular, celebrate nothing so much as reckless behavior.”
“Such as falling in love?” Lady Griselda asked. “My dear Mr. Spenser, what kind of plays would be left without human folly?”
Gillian was conceiving a strong dislike for the professor and his haughty opinions about art. “Perhaps Lady Maitland and Lady Griselda could glance at my suggestions tonight,” she said. “Since Mr. Spenser does not seem to be suggesting a less trivial alternative.”
“Oh no,” Lady Griselda said hastily, “I have nothing to do with it. I couldn’t possibly act. The professional actress can manage whatever play you choose, I am sure.”
“I myself cannot play a part for such a large audience, as I am unmarried,” Gillian said. “Since my mother has stalwartly refused to act since the time I’ve known her, we may be forced to beg you to play a female role, Lady Griselda.”
“I’m most happy to help in other respects. Perhaps if the village were our only audience, but since people are being invited from London—”
“The invitations have already been accepted,” the duke said from the couch where he had collapsed. His voice allowed no compromise.
“I don’t understand,” Gillian said. She looked from the expressionless eyes of the professor to the wan face of his half brother, the duke. Then she put down the stack of books she was holding with a gentle thud. “There is something about this production that I do not grasp.”
“I understand your confusion,” Imogen Maitland said. “It is unusual. Given that Rafe never troubles himself about anything.”
“How can you say that?” the duke asked her, with a distinct snap in his voice. “When there are four rocking horses upstairs at this very moment to disprove you?”
An odd comment, to Gillian’s mind.
“Miss Pythian-Adams likely knows that you’ve never shown the slightest interest in amateur theatricals,” Lady Maitland said to him.