An Unlikely Duchess (10 page)

“Your husband?” Mrs. Hennessy clasped her hands to an ample bosom.

Caroline shrieked. “You are married, Jo? Oh, but you did not write and tell me so, you horrid, horrid creature.”

“It was all done rather hastily,” Mr. Villiers was saying, smiling fondly at her. “Special license and all that. We fell in love and there was no waiting. Was there, Josephine?”

“No,” she said. Now, had she put her hand in his or had he taken it? But there it was, resting in his. And she thought she was smiling at him. At least, it felt as if there was a smile on her face. “We were married yesterday, actually.”

“Just yesterday!” someone squeaked—Caroline probably. And Mr. Hennessy was roaring for a bottle of champagne or the next best thing the house could provide. Noisy introductions were being made on all sides, and they were all seated at the same table.

And her hand was still clasped in Mr. Villiers’s.

Oh, dear.

“Would that be one of the Sussex Villiers?” Mr. Hennessy was asking.

Mr. Villiers hesitated. “Just a very junior branch,” he said. “Do you live hereabouts, sir?”

It seemed that the Hennessys were on their way home from London—a long and weary journey, but only one day longer.

And it seemed that they, the newlywed Villierses, were on their wedding trip to Scotland. At least, that was what Mr. Villiers was explaining in a very amiable manner and smiling at her for confirmation. One of them had dropped the other’s hand by that time.

The Hennessys had been on the road for all of four days, yet all looked immaculate, as if they were dining in their own drawing room at home. Josephine became conscious of the creases in her dress and the crow’s nest balanced on her head.

“Oh,” she said, “the most amusing thing has happened. My maid, and, ah, um, Paul’s valet left home with all our baggage several tours before we did. They were supposed to be waiting for us at the inn last night and again tonight. But somehow the wrong directions must have been given. We have not set eyes on them since they left. Have we, Paul?” She giggled a trifle hysterically.

He grinned. Oh goodness, he had a lopsided grin. It transformed his face from nice to definitely attractive. “I am afraid I am reduced to one small bag and Josephine to one valise,” he said.

Josephine pushed at her hair. “I am afraid I am quite lost without Betty,” she said.

“But Jo,” Caroline said, “I will lend you Lucy tomorrow morning. You remember Lucy. And I have trunkfuls of clothes. You must come to my room and choose a clean dress for tomorrow. I am not a great deal larger than you.”

“Indeed,” Mrs. Hennessy said, looking to her husband for confirmation, “we would be quite honored and delighted if the two of you would come with us to Hawthorn House to spend a few days. Jo will tell you, Mr. Villiers, that the house affords a very pleasant prospect of the countryside around. You may walk and ride to your heart’s content.”

“And in the meantime we will send out to find your missing servants and belongings,” Mr. Hennessy said with a rumbling laugh. “That is quite a thing to happen on your wedding trip.”

Mr. Villiers somehow turned aside the invitation, Josephine was relieved to hear. The explanation involved him in picking up her hand again and kissing her fingers and smiling deep into her eyes. And Mr. Hennessy was laughing again and asking his wife if she remembered what young lovers were like and how they liked to be off on their own.

“Yes, Harvey,” his wife agreed, “but off on their own with no baggage is another thing altogether.”

It was decided, before they all settled to their meal and chattered away on numerous other topics, that the invitation should be considered an open one and that the newlyweds would accept it if they changed their minds during the following few days or if they found their baggage coach hopelessly lost.

But Josephine had noticed something else while Mr. Villiers was kissing her hand, and she felt constrained to explain to the Hennessys that when Paul had put her wedding ring on her finger the previous day, it had promptly fallen off again.

“The silly man,” she said, smiling fondly into his gray, interested eyes, “was in such a hurry to marry me that he bought the ring without measuring my finger. And it is too large. So it has to be carried around in his pocket until we can find a jeweler to make it smaller.”

“Whoever would have thought that anyone could have such very slim fingers,” Mr. Villiers said, grinning at her again in such a way that she almost lost the thread of her story. And he set three fingers and a thumb around the finger, where the ring would have been if there had been any ring, and slid them down to the end of her finger.

She did lose the trend of the story, but it did not matter. Mr. Hennessy laughed and Caroline sighed and Warren took snuff and sneezed rather more loudly than he ought.

And then just when Mr. Hennessy and Mr. Villiers were discussing the political situation and she and Caroline were reminiscing about school and she was feeling almost comfortable, the most dreadful thing of all happened.

“Eleven o’clock,” Mr. Hennessy announced, consulting a large pocket watch. “Time for bed, everyone. Especially for these two. They have doubtless been ready for it this hour and more and have been cursing this chance meeting.” He laughed heartily.

“Harvey!” Mrs. Hennessy said, laughing too.

Even Mr. Villiers was blushing, Josephine saw in one swift peep as he took her hand in his and placed it on his sleeve.

And their room, when they reached it a few minutes later, seemed very, very quiet indeed. And very much dominated by the large bed.

***

“I think,” said the Duke of Mitford, dragging off his coat and throwing it over the edge of the bed before raking one hand through his hair, “I have told more lies in one evening than I have in my whole lifetime before. It’s downright frightening.”

“I am so very sorry, sir,” Josephine Middleton said, clasping her hands before her and gazing up at him with wide, remorseful eyes. “But whoever would have thought I would run into people I know? I know hardly anyone—Papa and Grandpapa having this gothic notion that young persons are better brought up in the country than exposed to all the evils of town. But I did go to school, you see, and I suppose I do have acquaintances scattered all over the kingdom.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose no real harm has been done, except that the Hennessy family are going to find next time they hear from you that matters are somewhat different from what they thought.”

“Yes,” she said, and her hands fell to her sides and brushed ineffectually at the wrinkles in her dress.

It was probably as well that she had told the story about the lost baggage and servants, Mitford thought. Otherwise the Hennessys, believing they had been married just the day before, would doubtless have put quite another interpretation on her decidedly tumbled looking appearance. It quite put him to the blush to think of it.

And he really had told some bouncers. Most of the details of their marriage would, of course, come true, he had been coming to realize throughout the course of the day, although they should have been told in the future tense instead of in the past. Even down to the detail about the special license. By the time he got Miss Josephine Middleton hack to Rutland Park, he would have to rush her into marriage just as fast as he possibly could before dreadful scandal broke for both her and him—at least, he hoped it would be before. She had been hopelessly compromised over the course of twenty-four hours.

But he would be sure to measure her finger. And he would be very sure that Henry and her maid knew where to take their baggage for the first night of their wedding journey. The very idea that he could be such a careless fellow as to lose his own servants! The only real inaccuracy even in the future tense was the detail about their having fallen deeply in love. In love with this brainless little lady who could lie like a Drury Lane actress? Oh, Lord! He had never in his life met anyone so lacking in conduct and a sense of proper decorum. She was blushing and smiling and removing the pins from her hair. “I will sleep on the floor tonight, sir,” she said. “It is only fair, and really I do not mind at all.”

“You will sleep on the bed, Miss Middleton,” he said, watching, fascinated, as heavy curly hair cascaded almost to her waist. It must weigh as much as she did. It was really rather magnificent. She should always leave it loose. He repressed the thought, though, when he suddenly had a mental image of her sitting beside him in his curricle, waving to the dandies on the roofs of the stages, her curly locks blowing in the wind.

Oh, Lord.

“Really,” she said, and she flushed a deeper shade of red, “there is no need for either of us to sleep on the floor. It is rather a large bed, and we could both keep over to our side. I think it would be silly for you to sleep on the floor.”

Mitford did not think it would be silly, but he knew it would be deuced uncomfortable.

“I will leave you for ten minutes,” he said, watching her hands go to the neck of her dress and then fall to her sides again. He picked up his recently discarded coat. “Sleep well, ma’am, and don’t worry about me. Tomorrow is likely to be a long and busy day again.”

He wandered down to the taproom and ordered a pint of ale. He hoped none of the Hennessys would decide to come down for a nightcap. It would look strange indeed that he had abandoned his bride after eleven o’clock on the second night of their marriage.

What a coil! All he would need now was to run into someone he knew.

It really was quite shocking how easy it was to lie when one felt the necessity of doing so. And it had been necessary. He did not care to imagine the looks on the faces of Miss Middleton’s friends if they had known that she was traveling alone with a man who was not her husband, and had discovered that she was sharing a room at the inn with him.

Good Lord, was that what was really happening? Could it possibly be that he, Paul Villiers, Duke of Mitford, not to mention his string of lesser titles, was really involved in such an indiscretion? And the word
indiscretion
was such an understatement that it was laughable.

He was never indiscreet. Or improper. Or impulsive. Or reckless. He could go on and on. He was never anything but perfectly respectable. How could he be otherwise? He had held all those titles since he was seventeen years old, and one for much longer than that, and all the responsibilities that went with them.

A junior branch of the Sussex Villiers, indeed. Good Lord, he was head of the family and had been for eleven years. It had been a sticky moment when Mr. Hennessy had asked that. And now that he was thinking on the subject, did Miss Middleton not know that the Duke of Mitford’s family name was Villiers? Apparently not.

Half an hour passed before he returned to their room. It was not one of his traveling companion’s quick ten minutes. Perhaps he should not have left the room at all, he thought as he dawdled his way up the stairs. Going back in there was probably the most difficult thing he had done in more than twenty-four hours. Even entering her room, shoulder first, the evening before had not been so difficult because he had had no time to think about the matter.

But he had had half an hour to think about this one. He was about to share a room with an unmarried young lady. It was a hair-raising prospect. He had never even spent a whole night in Eveline’s room. And that had been different, anyway. Eveline had been a widow, and one year older than he, and a woman of the world. And she had been his mistress.

Good Lord, what was he about? He really should have returned her to her father the night before. He could not now imagine why he had not done so. And that morning, when she had discovered the loss of her jewels, he should have taken her home without further ado and enlisted help—her brother’s perhaps—to go after the thief.

He should never-never!—have consented to take to the open road alone with her.

And what he ought to do now, since he could not go back to amend the past, was rise with the dawn and convey her home with all speed. It was disastrously late to take such a course, but nevertheless it was the only course to take.

He would do it.

In the meantime, he would have to pluck up the courage to enter their shared bedchamber. Well, he thought, turning the key in the door resolutely, there was no help for it. And at least she had the modesty to be pretending to sleep. He had half expected to find her sitting up in bed in that shift or whatever else it was she had been wearing—or almost not wearing—when she had smiled down at him that morning, waiting to chatter his head off about something. The girl could certainly chatter. She had scarce stopped all day long.

But she was curled up so far to one side of the bed that she looked as if she were in danger of falling off. And the blankets covered her decently to the chin. She had her eyes closed, but she was breathing too quietly and too quickly to be sleeping. She had left a second pillow balanced at the opposite edge of the bed from where she lay.

Mitford looked at it longingly and at the floor with some distaste. It did not look quite as uneven as last night’s floor, but he realized suddenly that he was all over aches and pains. What he would really like more than anything in the world was to throw off all his clothes and step into a bathtub overflowing with hot soapy water.

He took off his coat again and pulled off his boots. The rest of his clothes would have to stay where they were, he thought regretfully. And he did not even have a clean shirt to put on the next day; He picked up the pillow and hurled it vengefully at the floor. At least it would be an improvement on his bag.

But every muscle screamed at him when he lowered himself to the floor and tried to cover himself with his greatcoat. It seemed that either his shoulders or his feet would have to be exposed to the night air.

But dammit, he thought with unaccustomed vehemence as he realized finally that there was no such thing as a comfortable way to lie on such a surface, there were three quarters of a soft looking bed and warm blankets waiting just above him. And perhaps she really was asleep. It had been a long and tiring day for her too.