The Ugly Duchess (12 page)

James looked at himself in the glass and approved.
Not a trace of an English earl looked back at him. He looked like a man who
cared for no one, not for his wife or his family or his heritage.

That wasn’t quite true, but he could make it
true.

Now he was a pirate.

One year later

U
sing
their perfected (and extremely successful) pincer action, the
Flying Poppy
and the
Poppy
Two
had just divested yet another pirate ship, the
Dreadnaught,
of her ill-gotten gains. Pallets of
teakwood and barrels of China tea were now nestled in the hold of the
Flying Poppy
together with the
Dreadnaught’
s
crew, their ship having
followed the body of their captain, Flibbery Jack, into the depths of the Indian
Ocean.

Griffin and James were sprawled in Griffin’s cabin,
celebrating their latest conquest with a glass or two of cognac. After that
first night together, they had not overindulged again; it wasn’t in their
natures.

“We’re surprisingly alike,” James said, following
that thought to its logical conclusion.

“Damn good sailors,” Griffin replied. “Just when I
think that the
P-Two
can’t possibly sidle up where
I’d like her to, you manage it.”

“Pity about those men.”

“The dead ones?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t lose any of our own. And the crew of the
Dreadnaught
were feared through the East
Indies,” Griffin pointed out. “We’ve done the world a favor. Another favor,
given that we scuttled the
Black Spider
last month.
And may I point out that the
Dreadnaught
gained her
reputation by capturing a passenger ship bound for Bombay and walking every
single man, woman, and child down the plank?”

“I know it,” James said. All his research on
pirates and their routes had served them well in the last few months. The
Poppy
s were now as feared by pirates as pirates were
feared by trading vessels.

“We’re bloody Robin Hoods, we are.”

“With the tiny exception that we don’t give to the
poor,” James said dryly.

“We returned that golden statue to the King of
Sicily. We could have sold it.” Griffin was not one for the magnanimous
gesture.

“Ferdinand’s letter giving us the right to fly his
flag as privateers is worth more than Saint Agatha, even if the statue wasn’t
hollow—which it was, may I point out.”

Griffin just shrugged. He didn’t like giving
anything away for free, but even he had to admit that privateers lived an easier
life than pirates, though the distinction was certainly a foggy one.

“What are you going to do with all that fabric you
put in your cabin, by the way?” he asked. “Are you planning to lure a woman on
board? The men won’t hold with it. The first storm that hit, you’d look around
for your popsy and find they’d tossed her overboard to appease the sea devils,
or Poseidon, or what have you.”

“I thought I’d send the fabric to my wife. She
always talked about cloth more than she did dresses themselves, and the silks
are lovely. The
Dreadnaught
must have caught a silk
trader.”

“Why on earth would you do such a thing?” Griffin
asked, clearly astonished. “She booted you out the door, and quite rightly, from
what you said. Why remind her of your miserable existence?”

“Good question,” James said, throwing back his
cognac. “Forget the fabric; we must do something with the gold.”

“Bank it,” Griffin said promptly. “When I think of
the way I used to simply stash it in a cave before you came along, it makes me
twitch all over. Shall we stow it in Genoa or open a new account somewhere
else?”

“I’m worried about our account in that Paris bank,
given Napoleon’s sticky fingers,” James said. “I think we’d better head there
and close that account. We’ll put the lot in Genoa.”

Griffin put his empty glass to the side and stood.
“Look, James, I have some bad news. The bos’un on the
Dreadnaught
was taken on in Bristol two months ago, and he had
this.”

He walked to the sideboard, picked up a newspaper
lying there, and handed it to James. A black-bordered notice announced that the
Duke of Ashbrook had died suddenly.

James stared down at the paper. His father was
dead, and had been for two months. Just like that, his world changed. Then,
after a few seconds, he rose, quite calmly, and said, “I’ll go back to the
Poppy Two
and tell the men that we’re en route for
Marseille. We’d better swap out the sails and turn into privateers.”

Griffin gave him a swift punch in the arm. “Don’t
think I’m going to ‘Your Grace’ you. Do you suppose the men will catch on if we
announce your name is changing to Duke? Earl doesn’t really seem fitting for one
of your grand stature.”

James didn’t bother to answer. He climbed the
stairs wearily. They had a crew member whose only job was to row back and forth
between the
Poppy
s, and a moment later he was once
again crossing the short distance. Dusk had fallen, and the ocean seemed drained
of color and detail, as if the rowboat plowed through a gray mist.

Back in his own cabin, he felt so exhausted that he
dropped on the bunk without undressing. It had been a long, grueling day: from
the moment a pirate ship was spied, he and the other men often didn’t sleep for
forty-eight hours, a period of tense watchfulness that generally culminated in a
bloody battle. Pirates always fought hard, and beating them was a ruthless,
hand-to-hand business. Today’s taking of the
Dreadnaught
had followed the pattern.

Despite his physical exhaustion, his mind felt
frozen, unable to think of anything but his father’s death. His man appeared
with a basin of hot water before quietly departing. James heaved himself from
the bunk and stripped off his clothing, memories ricocheting around his
brain.

He had spent a good deal of his life loathing his
father, but he had never thought of him not being there. Never. The duke wasn’t
terribly old, but then James remembered the purple color in his cheeks during
his attacks of rage. His heart had burst, no doubt.

And yet . . . and yet for all his father
had done, James had never truly questioned whether he loved him, James, his son
and heir, his only child. The duke was a fool, a gamester, a reckless man who
trampled the feelings of those around him. And yet he
did
love James. The fact that he had died without knowing that his
son was alive or dead: that felt like a knife under James’s ribs.

The memories flooded in, and not those to do with
stealing Daisy’s dowry or anything like that. No, they were the way his father
used to burst into the nursery and swing him onto his shoulder; the way he’d let
him hide under his desk so that his tutor couldn’t find him; the way he’d show
up at Eton completely unannounced and use his title to bully his way into the
classroom and then take James and all his friends out boating on the river
Thames.

Grief was locked together with guilt. The two
emotions sat at the base of his chest like a stone, telling him that his father
died broken-hearted.

He knew it.

He should have . . . He should have
. . . What? It hardly mattered now. He had done nothing. And the duke
was
gone.
As lost to James now as his mother
was.

Daisy would have managed it all, the funeral, and
the rest of it. Daisy would have made sure her father-in-law, no matter how
despised, had a proper monument.

His sponge bath finished, he stared at the pile of
fabric in the corner as he dried himself. He was desperate to think about
anything other than his father’s death.

The fabrics glimmered like the souks of North
Africa and the bazaars of India from which they’d come. His gaze fixed on one
cloth that captured the pale blue of a hot summer day in England, when the sky
seems so high and far away that it might as well be heaven.

Even as he stared, willing his mind blank, he could
almost hear his father screaming at him, telling him to stop being a horse’s
arse and come back, face his responsibilities, take over the dukedom.

Yet now that voice was forever silenced. James’s
memories of his father felt useless and far away, as if England were no more
than a kingdom under the sea, a land of fishes where he would fit in as well as
a trout behind the pulpit of St. Paul’s.

The hell with it.

He had stopped dreaming of Daisy, but that didn’t
mean he’d stopped thinking of her altogether. He still did, though mostly alone
in his bunk, when recovering from a knife wound.

If he were given the chance to do it over, he
wouldn’t have fled England. He would have carried his wife upstairs and thrown
her on the bed, and made her understand how he felt about her. But it was too
late for that: those dreams were as dead as his father.

There was nothing in England for him. He had to be
gone seven years before they could declare him dead. Well, in a mere month or
two, he would have been at sea for two years. Pinkler-Ryburn was a decent
fellow; he’d assume the title in five years if James failed to return. Then
Daisy could marry again. Severing all ties to England would extinguish, for once
and all, this odd and shameful longing to return home to her.

He could hear Daisy’s voice as clear as a bell in
his ear when she had told him their marriage was over. And when she had said
that another man would fall in love with her, a better man than he.

That was easy enough to imagine. James had never
loathed anyone as much in his life as he loathed himself.

He shouted, and his man popped in the door. “Throw
that lot overboard,” he ordered, nodding at the cloth. The man gathered the
cloth into his arms and scurried from the cabin.

An hour later, James had a shaved head and a small
poppy tattooed beneath his right eye. He appropriated a name from Flibbery Jack,
the pirate captain who would no longer be needing it, and gave it to
himself.

Long live Jack Hawk.

Because James Ryburn, Earl of Islay and Duke of
Ashbrook, was dead.

Fifteen

June 1811

Ryburn House,
Staffordshire

Duchy of
Ashbrook

T
heo ran a
hand through her short hair, loving the fact that her head felt light and free.
She’d cropped her hair the day after her marriage fell apart, and she had never
regretted it. “What did you say, Mama? I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”

“May I offer you a piece of apple cake?”

“No, thank you.”

“You must
eat,
” Mrs.
Saxby said rather sharply, handing Theo a piece of cake nonetheless. “You do
nothing but work, darling. Work, work, work.”

“There’s a great deal of work to be done,” Theo
said reasonably. “And you must admit that it’s all going quite well, Mama. We
are producing our very first ceramics sometime this month. And the Ryburn
Weavers has fourteen new orders. Fourteen!” She couldn’t help a triumphant grin
at the very thought.

“That’s all very well,” Mrs. Saxby said, “but you
look almost gaunt. It’s not becoming.”

Theo let that pass. After a few months that she
still hated to think about, she had settled into acceptance of her “ugly”
status. When James had fled London, the
ton
assumed,
quite naturally, that he couldn’t contemplate more than two days of marriage to
an ugly duchess-to-be. No one talked of anything else for a good month,
evidenced by what gossip filtered its way into the newspapers. Theo had not been
there to experience the firestorm in person; she had left the city the same day
James did, retreating to Staffordshire, where her mother had joined her after
returning from Scotland.

By the time people discovered that James had taken
the
Percival
and set off for foreign parts, she was
safely ensconced in the country and, though occasional sorties to London were
unavoidable, she hadn’t ventured back into polite society—the very word made her
lip curl—since.

“Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn’s wedding is approaching,” her
mother insisted. “We must both look our best.”

“As I said when the invitation first arrived, I see
no reason why I should attend the wedding of my husband’s putative heir to the
cretinous Claribel. Besides,” she added more reasonably, “it would take nearly a
week, since the nuptials are being held in Kent. I couldn’t possibly spare the
time; August is a very busy month.”

Mrs. Saxby’s teacup joined its saucer with a bit
more force than necessary. “Darling, I hoped not to have to say this to you, but
you are growing rigid.” Her hair had turned a little gray, and she’d lost some
of the bounce in her step after her son-in-law’s dramatic departure, but she had
never weakened in her adherence to courtesy. “You must attend as a
representative of the duchy.
And
because Mr.
Pinkler-Ryburn is a very good man.”

“His worth has nothing to do with it,” Theo said.
“I simply cannot hare off to a wedding when I need to be here.” She could be
quite as stubborn as her mother.

“You have taken a very
pinched
view of life,” Mrs. Saxby continued. “You may have had an
unhappy experience of marriage, but is that a reason to turn into a
sharp-tongued, unhappy woman?”

“I’m not unhappy,” Theo said, adding honestly,
“most of the time. Besides, happiness is not something one can control.”

“I disagree. Life dealt you a few blows. But what
happened to the daughter I used to know? Where is your list of style rules? You
always said that as soon as I stopped dictating your apparel, you were going to
throw your pearls to the swine, and so on. I didn’t always agree, but I was very
interested to see what you would make of yourself.”

Theo glanced down at her gown defensively. “There’s
nothing wrong with my gown. We’re in mourning for the duke, after all.”

“It was made in the village. The only thing that
can be said in its favor is that the seams are reasonably straight.”

“I am not interested in adorning myself; that was a
girlish dream that I put aside. Besides, I spend almost all my time in the
study. Why would I need a gown created by a modiste, especially one in mourning
colors, when I have no one to display it for?”

“A lady does not dress for an audience.”

“I beg to differ. As a debutante she dresses in
order to find a husband, God help her—”

“That’s just the sort of comment I mean,” her
mother put in.

Theo sighed. “I suppose I could order a gown or two
from London once we’re out of mourning, if it would make you happy. But I’m
certainly not traveling back for fittings, and I shall not attend Pink’s
wedding.”

“Happiness,” her mother said, returning to the
subject, “is a matter of self-control. And you are not exhibiting enough of
it.”

For the first time during the exchange, Theo felt a
prickle of real annoyance. How could anyone, least of all her mother, claim she
did not exhibit self-control? In the last years, she’d stayed in the study for
hours after the household went to bed, poring over books describing Italian
ceramics and Elizabethan furnishings.

She had traveled around the entire estate once a
week in a pony cart, to ensure that the sheep herds and the conditions of the
cottagers were improving. Her trips to London were taken up not with theater and
the shops, but with visits to Cheapside and a building full of clanking looms.
“I think I show self-control,” she said, making an effort to prove it by not
allowing her annoyance to show.

“Oh, you work,” Mrs. Saxby said dismissively.

“The estate is now profitable, even after all the
allowance we had to pay the embezzling duke,” Theo snapped. And then, hearing
the hectoring edge in her own voice, she felt a wave of remorse. “Please forgive
me. I certainly didn’t mean to turn into a virago. And it wasn’t a kind
statement as regards His Grace, given that he’s dead.”

Her mother reached over and patted her hand. “I
know you didn’t, darling.”

But she did not deny that Theo had become something
of a harpy. Drat. “Buying fine feathers in London won’t make me someone other
than who I am,” Theo pointed out.

“You are beautiful,” her mother said now, once
again demonstrating her ready ability to overlook the obvious. “The more
beautiful for not looking like everyone else.”

Theo sighed. “Any feathers and furbelows I add to
my person will merely diminish my dignity. My self-respect. If I play the game
of making myself look pretty, I will not succeed, and I will just look foolish
and vain.”

Her mother put down her teacup again. “Theodora, I
did not bring you up to be such a weak-livered, cowardly person. You are not the
first woman to receive a blow to your self-regard, and you will not be the last.
But that does not excuse you, nor make it acceptable to wallow in self-pity. By
avoiding the
ton,
you make yourself a continuing
subject of conversation and speculation. Even more importantly, by dwelling on
the less fortunate side of your marriage, you make yourself disagreeable.”

“I do not dwell on my marriage! And in truth, Mama,
what would you deem the ‘fortunate’ side of my marriage?”

Her mother met her eyes. “Theodora, it is my
distinct impression that you enjoy the way everyone on this estate listens to
your every word. And that’s not to mention the effort you’ve put into the
weaving concern and the ceramics factory.”

This was indisputably true.

“You would never have had this opportunity had you
married Lord Geoffrey Trevelyan. I saw him at the opera a fortnight ago, by the
way. It was a production of
Così fan tutte,
sung in
Italian.”

“A nice way to make your point,” Theo said,
grinning. “You’re right. I would rather not be made to endure hours of
opera.”

“Still, you refuse to allow yourself to be happy.
You are bent on seeing yourself as an injured party, whereas in fact you have
triumphed over adversity. You threw your husband out the door, and in what I can
only imagine was a paroxysm of guilt, James obeyed you.”

“He wanted to go,” Theo countered, having realized
it at some point, and more or less made her peace with it. “He married to
protect his father’s honor, but that doesn’t mean that he wished to stay
married, at least not to me.”

Her mother looked at her, and then back down at the
teapot. “May I offer you a fresh cup, my dear?”

“No, thank you. I just did it again, didn’t I?”
Theo asked, with a sort of wry chagrin curling in her stomach.

“Life is a good deal more complicated than you
admit. I would certainly, for example, contest your characterization of James’s
motives, but it seems irrelevant at this moment. After all, the poor man may be
dead.”

Theo flinched. “Of course he’s not dead! He’s
staying away in a sulk. I did not say that he needed to stay out of England
forever. I merely said that I did not wish to see him again.”

“In my opinion, James’s deepest attachment in
England was to you. When you dismissed him, he likely severed all attachments in
order to protect his heart. His father reminded him of nothing more than his
ill-mannered behavior to you, and now the poor duke is dead. There is nothing to
bring James back to England.”

“ ‘Ill-mannered!’ ” Theo said, stung. “I would call
it rather more than that.”

Her mother ignored that comment. “No matter how
irresponsibly the late duke handled his money—and your inheritance—he opened his
house to us on your father’s death without a second thought. Ashbrook was never
happy again after James disappeared, and you do bear some responsibility for
that, Theo. He loved his son dearly.”

“You keep speaking as if James is dead,” Theo said,
surprising herself with the vehemence in her tone. “James is
not
dead.”

“One must hope not.” Her mother rose gracefully
from her chair. “I must finish going through the linens with Mrs. Wibble. I will
join you at luncheon, dearest.”

It was a dramatic exit, Theo had to admit.

James was not dead. She would know if he were
dead.

She did not bother to ask herself why she was so
certain of that fact. Instead, she jumped to her feet. She had just remembered
that she promised to send a new set of sketches to the factory that very
afternoon.

Aboard the
Poppy
Two

A
few
weeks after Jack Hawk came into being (and James Ryburn, Earl of Islay, was
declared dead by one who should know—that is to say, himself), the
Flying Poppy
and her shadow, the
Poppy Two
, docked at an island in the West Indies on their way to
France, and James—now known as Jack—succumbed to the amatory blandishments of a
plump and jolly widow named Priya.

She taught him a thing or two, even though he felt
terrible after the night with her. But his marriage was over—practically, if not
formally. Could he truly remain celibate for the rest of his life? Of course
not.

Unfaithful . . . unfaithful. He didn’t
like the word. It knocked around in his head for a month or two until he managed
to cram it into a dark corner of his mind and shut it up. His wife had ended
their marriage. Therefore, he was free to act as he would if he were not
married. It wasn’t adultery. It wasn’t.

He was acting in the only way a grown man could
whose marriage had ended. He was staying away so that, after the requisite seven
years, she could have him declared dead. He was living his life instead of
simply reacting to it. His heart gave another painful thump at the memory of his
father.

James learned even more from a Parisian
mademoiselle, and the next year, from a girl named Anela, who lived on a Pacific
island and thought the rising sun should be worshipped from a horizontal
position.

Jack proved to have a knack for prayer.

For his part, Griffin was never happier than when
he had a lass on each arm and French letters stowed all over his person. Since
neither of them was greedy—in bed or out—the very sight of the
Flying Poppy
and the
Poppy
Two
rounding into a cove soon enough became reason for rejoicing in
certain parts of the world.

“Jack Hawk” became a name that pirates loved to
curse. Every day was hard work, all of it physical—clambering up the rigging,
engaging in hand-to-hand combat, swimming between the
Poppy
s, praying with Anela. Jack’s skin darkened and his chest
broadened, until his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. He even grew a few
inches taller; he developed the powerful shoulders and thighs of a man who rules
the waves.

But at the same time, his blue eyes and high
cheekbones signaled aristocrat, though the small inked poppy under his right eye
signaled something quite different to pirates:
death.