There was no need to clarify who was wonderful; the fact that Loretta Hawes began her triumphant career as an actress at Holbrook Court was known to every member of the theatergoing public from London to Paris.
“Rafe and I are particularly fond of that play,” Imogen said, smiling at Griselda’s handsome husband as she spoke. “We were there on opening night.”
“Loretta,” Griselda said with the delight of someone who enjoyed dropping the famous actress’s first name, “will always shine in a tragic role. But she—”
Imogen was interrupted by a pull on her gown. “Mama!” She turned around. Her firstborn child, Genevieve, was standing there, looking uncannily like her papa, barring her deep lower lip, inherited from Imogen. Genevieve lowered her voice in the important way of a seven-year-old who understands proprieties. “Miss Metta has had palpitations from excitement, and now Luke is running about with his pants below his knees!”
Imogen curtsied to Griselda and Lady Blechschmidt. “If you’ll forgive me, ladies, I’m afraid there’s a domestic crisis behind stage.”
Two minutes later the pandemonium in the green room was doubled as the Spenser family burst into the room. One family member was laughing (Mary was one of the merriest girls for leagues, or so her papa said), one was crying (Mary’s brother Richard was at an age where he felt terrible rage if he didn’t achieve his own way,) and yet another was crowing (alas, Richard’s twin brother Charles was devoting his third year of life to ensuring that Richard did not achieve his own way).
But in a half hour or so, the pies were in position, the actors were costumed, and the audience was applauding madly.
On the stage strolled Widow Trankey, her wild blond curls concealing a duchess’s glowing hair. She had a hand on her hip and an insouciant smile for Professor Cheatley. He was played not by the duke’s brother, as would have made sense, but by the duke himself. There hadn’t been a year in which the entire audience hadn’t screamed with delight every time Professor Cheatley opened his mouth and drawled a few slow, pedantic phrases in his brother’s voice. Professor Cheatley spent most of the pantomime trying to pull Widow Trankey under the mistletoe, although she was most adroit at avoiding it, and him, and seemed to particularly delight in flinging pies in his direction.
But the star of the show, as it had been for the past three years, was the Principal Boy, played by Miss Mary Spenser in a pair of breeches that (her mother had made certain) were neither revealing nor indiscreet. In fact, she looked rather like a Dutch trader in great billowing breeches. But none of that mattered, for it was her face that made everyone break into gales of laughter: the way she darted under Widow Trankey’s arm, avoiding a pie, the way her eyebrows shot up as she listened to the pedantic statements of Professor Cheatley, alias the Duke of Holbrook. It was the way she tore across the stage and hid behind her mother’s skirts (playing the role of evil stepmother, naturally), and then danced silently behind her father (playing the king) to drop a pie on his head at just the right moment.
All in all, this Christmas pantomime was just as exuberant, delightful, and beloved as it had been the last six years.
The curtain fell, as it had for the last six years, when Professor Cheatley finally managed to grab the Widow Trankey and pull her under the sprig of mistletoe hanging from the center of stage front. The curtain fell on their kiss, and there wasn’t a member of the audience who didn’t sigh.
Well, perhaps Lady Blechschmidt wasn’t quite as delighted. She felt that the duke and duchess’s embrace was a trifle too passionate for her taste…the way the duke bent the duchess back over his arm…really! They seemed to have quite forgotten their rank, not to mention the presence of their children.
In truth, the Duke of Holbrook often forgot his rank. Particularly when he was kissing his wife.
“Rafe, you must stop!” Imogen whispered, trying to push him away.
“That’s not what you said yesterday afternoon in the Priest’s Hole,” he said in her ear.
“Oh you—” Imogen said, but he was grinning down at her, and he was so dear, so perfect, and so much her own Rafe that her eyes filled with tears.
He knew…he always knew what she was thinking. He said it so quietly that she almost didn’t hear him. “I’m not planning on dying, Imogen, but I’m yours past that moment.”
The curtain rose for bows, only to discover that the duke was still kissing his wife and Miss Mary Spenser was tiptoeing across the stage elaborately, her finger to her lips hushing the audience and her face alight with laughter.
A moment later a cream pie landed on top of the kissing couple, and the curtain fell again.
A Note on Drinking Whiskey and Editing Plays, Though Not at the Same Time
I’s a difficult thing to make a hero of a man addicted to alcohol. And it’s even harder to keep the story both accurate to the historical period and the process of drying out. Back in the 1800s, people did not think of alcoholism as an illness, and methods for overcoming addiction were not in the public vernacular. I am lucky enough to have friends who have survived the harrowing process of overcoming an addiction to alcohol; their descriptions were invaluable to me. One book that was a tremendous help in deciphering early English attitudes toward drink was John London’s Jack Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs, first published in 1913. The publication date falls a century after my period, but I found the book invaluable because it pre-dates our medicalized view of alcoholic addiction. I am prouder of Rafe than any of my other heroes: unlike the rakish gentlemen who populate so many historical novels, the problems Rafe faced were huge, if not insurmountable, and yet he managed to overcome them with a modicum of grace and a good deal of humor.
Some years ago when I was an assistant professor of English literature at Washington University in St. Louis, I was offered a truly magnificent sum to edit two plays, one of which was The Man of Mode. My edition of that play appeared in the 1998 Longman Anthology of British Literature. The work of editing The Man of Mode served the double purpose of helping to pay my student loans and causing me to fall thoroughly in love with George Etheridge’s witty, caustic prose. It has been a true pleasure to include threads of that play here, especially the shadow of Etheridge’s great hero Dorimant who has, like Rafe, “something of the angel yet undefaced in him.”
The Taming of the Duke contains so many echoes of early English literature that I can’t catalog them here. If you would like to know more about Cristobel’s songs, Josie’s quotations of Shakespeare, or Christmas pantomimes in the 1800s, please visit my website at www.eloisajames.com. The “Inside Take” section of the Bookshelf entry for The Taming of the Duke documents all these enticing bits of early modern prose.
About the Author
Author of ten award-winning romances, ELOISA JAMES is a professor of English literature who lives with her family in New Jersey. All her books must have been written in her sleep, because her days are taken up by caring for two children with advanced degrees in whining, a demanding guinea pig, a smelly frog, and a tumbledown house. Letters from readers provide a great escape! Write Eloisa at
[email protected] or visit her website at www.eloisajames.com.
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By Eloisa James
THE TAMING OF THE DUKE
KISS ME, ANNABEL
MUCH ADO ABOUT YOU
YOUR WICKED WAYS
A WILD PURSUIT
FOOL FOR LOVE
DUCHESS IN LOVE
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE TAMING OF THE DUKE. Copyright © 2006 by Eloisa James. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub Edition © OCTOBER 2006 ISBN: 9780061800337
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Eloisa James, The Taming of the Duke
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