Desperate Duchesses (37 page)

As he climbed the stairs, a footman swept open the front door. Inside, he handed his hat to one, and his cape to another.

“I shal keep my sword,” he said to Parsloe, who was bowing. “I am not in the mood for kil ing tonight.”

The rules of the chess club insisted on no weapons, but what could Parsloe say? The duke ruled. And not because of his title, either.

Vil iers strol ed into the main room, knowing that anger was burning within him like a slow coal, and rather relishing the pure stupidity of it. He didn’t want the girl, never real y wanted the girl, and now he was angry because he no longer had her?

Such is the foolishness of men.

Lord Woodword Jourdain looked up when he came in. “Vil iers!” he cried. “You’re just in time to try my new chess game.”

Vil iers strol ed to his side and looked down at the cacophony of pieces. “How many pieces in this version, Jourdain?”

“Twenty-eight,” Jourdain said eagerly. “Ten rows and fourteen columns. I had to make up a special board.”

“This piece?” Vil iers put a beautiful y manicured forefinger on a piece.

“The concubine,” Jourdain said.

“An errant piece, no doubt.”

“Only held in check by two additional bishops.”

“And these?”

“Crowned rooks.”

“I think not,” Vil iers said, turning away. “I’ve had enough of females, concubines or otherwise…they are al so tiresome, are they not?”

Jourdain huffed in annoyance, but Viscount St. Albans looked up. “Do tel ,” he said with his usual lisp. “Has true love tarnished so quickly?”

“Ah, what is love?” Vil iers said. The only person sitting before an unattended chessboard was Lord Gordon. “A game, my lord?”

“My pleasure, Your Grace.”

“I’l give you a rook advantage,” Vil iers said gently.

Lord Gordon’s face showed no response at al to this insult, merely a bovine gratitude, and Vil iers felt his temper slip a notch higher.

“
What is love, ’tis not hereafter
,” St. Albans said. “I believe that’s Shakespeare, but even so, Your Grace, your experience of love must have been remarkably brief. It’s been no more than a day since I heard you were engaged.”

“I give you the joy, St. Albans, of being the first to know that I am no longer engaged,” Vil iers said.

“At least try a few of the pieces,” Jourdain said, suddenly appearing at his shoulder. “You’ve no idea how interesting it makes the game, Vil iers. Take the concubine.” He plumped the piece down in the middle of the board. “Here’s another for you, Gordon. She moves al directions, of course, just like the queen. Her special touch is that she can take two men in a row, but she never takes the king or the queen.” He giggled madly. “She’s not that sort of concubine.”

“What?” Gordon’s pink lips flapped like a fish on the dock, Vil iers decided. “We can’t play with a piece like that.”

“You play with pieces like that al the time,” Vil iers said sweetly. “That was you I glimpsed with Mrs. Rutland the other night?”

Gordon was rearranging his pieces and didn’t look up. Vil iers could only hope that he remembered where they al went.

“The concubine goes in front of the king’s rook,” Jourdain instructed. “She’s on her knees already, you understand.”

It wasn’t that he wished to marry. But there had been something interesting about the last few days, during which he felt part of something—of a family, one had to suppose. Yet what a family? Who would want to tie himself to that ridiculous marquess? Clearly, the man felt the same about him.

“I don’t want to play with this piece,” Gordon said, jutting out his lip. “I’ve a good shot at winning with a rook advantage.

This piece wil just mess it al up.”

“Concubines always do,” St. Albans said. He had pul ed over a chair. “You should watch out for Mrs. Rutland, Gordon. Her husband was swearing to revenge his horns the other night.”

“He’l have a pretty time deciding which man to chal enge,” Vil iers said idly. He hadn’t real y decided whether to play with the concubine. On the one hand, it was a sil y piece. On the other, it would irritate Gordon and Lord knows why he had sat down in front of the moribund fool.

“Mrs. Rutland is a praiseworthy woman,” Gordon said.

“Wel , you should know,” Vil iers said. “You may begin, Gordon.” He placed his concubine in front of his king’s rook. “Quite a brave little piece, isn’t she?”

“She can turn the entire game,” Jourdain said.

“I’ve no doubt. Your move, Gordon.”

Gordon pushed forward a pawn and said with his customary obstinacy, “Mrs. Rutland is no concubine.”

“No one said she is,” Vil iers said. It was his move and he decided to try out the concubine by taking one of Gordon’s pawns and then his king’s rook. Why not?

Gordon breathed heavily through his nose in a revolting manner. “Look here, Jourdain,” he said, “how can we play a proper game with that dreadful concubine going about and sweeping up pieces right and left?”

“So true to life,” Vil iers said thoughtful y. “I wouldn’t have thought you capable of it, Jourdain.”

Jourdain turned a little pink. “Go on, Gordon,” he urged. “Just think it through, man.”

Gordon was incapable of thinking anything through, including his relations with Mrs. Rutland. “You might want to turn the lock next time you decide to shed your breeches in public,” Vil iers said, just when he considered that Gordon might be actual y concentrating on a move. “Your wife would have been most distressed to walk into the sitting room and see you rutting away like that.”

“Rutting Rutland,” the viscount said with a simpering laugh, showing that he was ever a man who had to say the obvious.

“I don’t care for your phrasing,” Gordon stated, looking up at Vil iers.

Vil iers felt a lazy spur of interest. Final y the great walrus was listening to him. “But
rutting
is such an evocative phrase,”

he complained.

Gordon pushed back his chair with a scraping noise, shocking in the smal room.

Parsloe rushed forward. “My lords, may I remind you of the rules of the London Chess Club? Physical interaction of any kind and the participants lose their membership.”

Gordon paused. Vil iers could almost see the cogs turning in his head. Final y he pul ed back to the table and said, “At least I didn’t almost marry her.”

Vil iers lifted his eyes from the chessboard very slowly. “Since I gather you are unlikely to be talking about your virtuous wife, would you like to clarify yourself?”

Gordon bent over, huffing a little, and swept his concubine forward to take a pawn, fol owed by one of Vil iers’s bishops.

“After I left Mrs. Rutland at the bal , I happened into the library. My guess would be that
you
, Vil iers, have lost your fiancée to the Earl of Gryffyn. Of course, I would never soil a lady’s reputation by saying anything about…rutting.”

Vil iers knew quite wel that the wave of rage he felt was unfair and improper. It was just that if Gordon saw Roberta in the library with Gryffyn—that would be
before
he asked her to marry him,
before
he told her to lose her chastity,
before
he decided to end their engagement. At the very moment she was doing her best to lure him to the point.

There are times when irrational feelings are insuppressible. He felt sick. That was it—sick. He looked up to find St.

Albans’s avid little eyes fixed on him like a pig spotting a rotten apple. Albans was watching for the slightest trace of emotion, he knew. He’d be
damned
if he al owed anyone to think that he cared.

“Queens are so unstable,” he said sweetly. “They careen across the board, and sometimes turn into concubines before one’s very eyes.”

St. Albans laughed. Gordon shook his head. “You’re unnatural, Vil iers. You real y are. You don’t give a damn, do you?”

Gordon moved forward a rook, so Vil iers took it. “Check.”

“Where?” Gordon bleated.

“My queen.”

“I have a bishop.”

“Ah, but I’m afraid the concubine wil take care of the bishop, as they so often do,” Vil iers pointed out.

“One might say that concubines conquer al ,” St. Albans said, with his high cackle.

Vil iers pushed back from the table. He couldn’t take another moment of this god-awful idiocy. “Gentlemen, at your service,” he said, bowing.

Gordon looked up from where he was glowering at the board. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he said, his pale blue eyes wide. “There wasn’t any rutting involved. In the library, I mean.”

“But there so clearly was this afternoon,” Vil iers said gently. “A concubine, you see, wil always display her nature, and I am happy to pass my ownership to Gryffyn. Your new piece,” he said, turning to Jourdain, “is dangerous.”

Jourdain shook his head. “You needed the extra bishops to keep her in check.”

Viscount St. Albans’s laugh said it al .

No number of bishops could keep a concubine in check.

Day nine of the Villiers/Beaumont chess matches

From Damon Reeve, Earl of Gryffyn, to the Duke of Villiers:

Your description of my future wife is al over London. Your seconds?

From the Duke of Villiers to the Earl of Gryffyn:

You’re a fool. If you kil me, she wil smel no less perfumed to you, and if I kil you, you wil soon smel much worse.

From the Earl of Gryffyn to the Duke of Villiers:

Your choice of weapons?

From the Duke of Villiers to the Earl of Gryffyn:

Rapiers. Dawn, Wimbledon Commons, near the windmil . Tuesday. I have a chess game planned with Lord Bonnington tomorrow and can’t bother with this. You are a hot-headed Fool who clearly has no sense of the Importance of Women (none whatsoever) nor of a good Sleep (vastly to be desired). I shal , however, resign myself to kil ing you.

Day ten of the Villiers/Beaumont chess matches

I
t was a noise beside her bed that woke her up. “Mmmm,” Roberta said, reaching out—and waking up instantly. “Teddy! Are you lost again, child?”

“No,” he said. He stood next to the bed like a little ghost in a white nightgown. His face, normal y so cheerful, was woebegone.

“What’s the matter?” she said, peering at him. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“Can we sleep with you?” he burst out.

“We?”

But it was too late. In clambered a smal boy and a kitten, who promptly leaped to the bottom of the bed and curled up there, somewhat to Roberta’s relief.

It took her twenty minutes to coax out of him the information that Rummer had given him. “Of course, Papa wil win the duel,” he said, snuggling down into the covers, one hand clasping hers. “Papa always wins, that’s what Rummer says.”

“Rummer shouldn’t have told you about the duel,” she said firmly. Her mind was whirling with terror, spinning with the fact of it.

If Damon was fighting Vil iers, he was fighting for her honor. And her honor, her honor wasn’t worth a scrap of paper, not in comparison to the way she felt about Damon. It was as if mortal coldness gripped her heart and clenched her stomach. What could she do?
What could she do?

She would pul Vil iers aside when he came to play his game with Jemma, and she would beg him. Surely he wouldn’t deny her, if only out of whatever fugitive affection that caused him to ask her to marry.

She stared into the darkness for hours, planning what to say, parsing her sentences, praying.

Mostly praying.

She fel asleep only when the light was peeking through the curtains of her bedchamber. Deep in a sleep of leaden exhaustion, she never heard Teddy scamper out of bed and return to the nursery to be roundly scolded by his nursemaid. She never heard her maid tiptoe in and then decide not to wake her, based on the white stil ness of her face. She was far too fast asleep to hear the faint commotion that greeted the arrival of the Duke of Vil iers, here to play his piece at chess.

She slept on.

When she final y awoke, she was aghast to see how high the sun had risen. But did it real y matter? The world knew where Vil iers spent his days: at Parsloe’s, playing chess. He had told her so himself. She’d find him there, if she had to.

She dressed in an utterly charming affair of light silk embroidered with bluebirds. Quite in Vil iers’s line, now she thought of it.

She went straight to Jemma’s chamber, bursting into the room, hoping that Vil iers was there, only to see the blood drain from Jemma’s face when she told her Teddy’s news.

“Vil iers said nothing to me this morning,” Jemma said.

“Vil iers has already been here?”

“He left an hour ago.” Jemma swal owed. “Oh God Almighty, why couldn’t you have kept out of Damon’s bed while you were engaged to Vil iers?”

Roberta sank into a chair. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I shal die from the guilt of it. I love Damon so much that I lost my head. I didn’t think.”

Jemma’s face softened. “I gather you no longer love Vil iers, then?”

“I was a fool.”

“It’s a common condition.”

“I’m going to ask Vil iers to back down,” Roberta said. “Do you think it might work?”

“He lost this morning,” Jemma said hol owly.

“He—”

“He lost the game. Al of London wil know by this afternoon. He lost to a woman. To me.”

There was no one in the breakfast room. Fowle informed her that Mrs. Grope had gone to the theater again, and her father had gone out. The mermaid, Roberta thought.

Damon had taken Teddy away for the day. A last day with his son, Roberta thought, and her heart flooded with such guilt that she could scarcely breathe. She would stop this duel if she had to kil Vil iers herself.

Unfortunately, like chess, she had neglected to study the fine points of swordsmanship.

“I should like a carriage,” she told Fowle, and a few minutes later, a smart chaise awaited her.

Roberta pul ed on her gloves. She was icy calm now. She was going to stop this monstrous thing before it happened.

Parsloe’s was a rather ordinary looking place for al the attention it got, to Roberta’s mind. She was met by a butler who asked her if she was a member of the chess club.